[FRIAM] Entropy RE-redux

[Santafe]

> On Jun 18, 2025, at 0:53, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Pieter,  I have had a lifetime of experiences with experts who agree that the answer to my question is so obvious that I  should not be asking it, but who, when brought together, cannot agree on an answer. 

Many people are bad teachers.  And for many subjects, canons of really terrible ways to teach have sprung up.  Thermodynamics is certainly one of those subjects.  

There is a weird pathology in science teaching, which reminds me of both-siderism in journalism.  It seems to consist of the premise that to be “empirical”, one treats the most un-parsed phenomenology from brute facts as things to be memorized, after which one stops.  That is instantiated in the language Frank forwarded from Gemini, and in that one aspect I am not a fan of it.  Fermi’s little 1953 book on thermodynamics is written adamantly in that style too.  The point of understanding is to put together a system in which one does not aspire to being merely a lookup table of brute facts.  I said the Gemini presentation of entropy as a state variable is at least correct (for the limited scope to which it refers) insofar as it admits an understanding.  But that presentation doesn’t give most of the concept structure — which means a much fuller operational account of just what one is doing — to offer a route to the actual understanding itself.  

On the other hand, there is that old Persian saying “There are no bad hosts; only bad guests.”  I think coined in 1979.

> That's what I mean by the emperor's new clothes paradigm.    Is "entropy" such a situation?   

No.

> Or does "entropy" a code for disparate conceptions?

One needs to ask a clearer question.  There is an aspect-centered way to state what one is after in constructing an entropy, in which the concept is the same, though many distinct constructions arise in distinct circumstances.   Much of this I have written repeatedly in posts over the years.  But please proceed….

> If so, is that OK? 

If A then B only has consequences if A.  But in this case, not A.

> Or is it a disequilibrium, a tension that must in time be relaxed?

Of course, I have no idea what gloss of disequilibrium you intend.  But in the interpretation “is there no coherent concept behind the name?”, I can answer:

No.  There is a coherent concept behind the name.

Anyway, as earlier; please proceed.

Eric




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