[FRIAM] Entropy Dux^3

[Sarbajit Roy]

It has been a very long time (too long) since I studied the 2nd law or
Shannon. It's all very veiled and foggy just now, however,  I have often
wondered if Entropy is fundamentally about ignorance, correlations, or
something deeper?

On Thu, Jul 3, 2025 at 11:47 PM Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear Long Suffering Friamers
>
> I think I have now managed to come up with a macrostate statement of a
> phenomenon that requires entropy for its understanding.  It parallels
> Lincoln's aphorism about fooling all of the people.
>
> *Assuming friction free and quasistatic motion and total insulation where
> appropriate:*
>
> *If you put a bunch of energy into a system by working on it,**you can
> recover all that energy as work.*
>
> *If you put a bunch of energy into a system by heating it,**you can
> recover all that energy as heating,*
>
> *If you put a bunch of energy into a system by working on it,** you can
> recover all that energy as heating.*
>
> *But if you put a bunch of energy into a system by heating, you can NOT
> recover all of that energy as work. *
>
> I think this is the asymmetry that requires the invention of entropy.
>
> Am I finally getting my Dux in a row?
>
> Nick
>
> --
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
> Clark University
> nthompson at clarku.edu
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
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