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Re: entropy



Is a nice homogeneous glass of water more "disordered" than a glass
containing the same amount of crushed ice? If I drop some food coloring
into a glass of water, and watch the pretty swirly patterns as I stir
the cup, is there more "disorder" in the intermediate swirls, or in
the final, uniformly colored result? Depends, I would maintain, on
what we mean by "disorder". If you'd like to *define* disorder to
be the logarithm of the number of states accessible to the system,
then yeah, entropy is disorder. But most students, I think, have a
rather imprecise conception of "disorder", so using this word without
a precise definition doesn't help them much, I'm afraid.

-Dan