Re: entropy

[Jim Green <JMGreen@sisna.com>]

I don't think this got to the list.   It is not very important, but I am not
going to let this contraption beat me!  If I request confirmation, all sorts
of bandwidth will be used.  How be it if only David Bowman confirms.  Thanks
David.




A comment or two re the entropy thread:

> Once again, we get 'ex-cathedra' pronouncements [mostly from 
> north of the border  ;-)  ] that dozen's of texts and years 
> of instruction are wrong--or damaging--or useless. 

1)  Rick, the fact is that dozens of texts *are* wrong, damaging, and/or
useless on various topics.  It seems to me that the criteria for deciding if
Bill-Nye-the-science-guy explanations might be offered to students is *not*
whether "they will do untill later", but rather whether those concepts will
later have to be overturned by a later instructor with great effort.   

> Yet the groups of four will not have any apparent consistent
> ordering of the four suits present. So in spite of some 
> mixing, and destroying of some of the order, other aspects 
> of order still remain.

2) Don, I don't understand your point here -- aren't  you saying that an
unshuffled deck has the same entropy as a shuffled deck????

3) It seems to me that the conflict here (minimal though it may be) is due
to the approach to the topic:  The thermodynamics/Clausius/Kelvin types have
no difficulty relating entropy to disorder. (In the class one drops a ball
allows it to come to rest and then waits for it to start bouncing again --
or, with courage, one might burn a newspaper in class and then wait for the
newspaper to reform itself.  See one says the system does not spontaneously
return from disorder.)  BUT the stat-mech/Kittel types focus on Boltzmann
and bean counting.


Jim Green
JMGreen@sisna.com