John Denker has made incorrect claims about me and my research. Denker wrote, "the principal advocates for the 'spreading metaphor' don't publish in the physics journals (on this topic or any other); they publish more-or-less exclusively in the religious literature, the journal of chemical education, and a few other narrowly-specialized venues."
For the record, my publications dealing with thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory (see the book, Maxwell's Demon 2: Entropy, Classical and Quantum Information, Computing, co-edited with Andy Rex).during my 48-year professional career have appeared mainly in about a dozen high quality, refereed physics journals. I do not shun the "probabilistic approach," and have a deep appreciation of the contributions of Clausius, Boltzmann, Gibbs, Shannon, and Jaynes. I have taught and written about them for years. Claims to the contrary are simply wrong. Furthermore, my rationale for using the spreading metaphor to help understand entropy is carefully delineated in my publications. The arguments are not "religious" in nature.
In addition to my appreciation of "traditional" approaches, I believe the spreading metaphor is an excellent interpretive tool. It is not intended for calculations, and is not at odds with statistical mechanics or information theory. At its core, the entropy of a solid with total energy E is related to the number of accessible quantum states W = W(E), via Boltzmann's entropy expression, S = k ln W. But as the solid is heated from near absolute zero to temperature T, the added energy E must spread spatially throughout the solid in order to access the W(E) accessible states. Such spatial energy redistributions generate entropy increases and can be used as a proxy for entropy increases. The entropy increase from near T=0 to temperature T is attributable to the added energy E that brings the system to that temperature. I believe that understanding the intimate connections between energy and entropy (which are explained in my 5-part article in the Physics Teacher) can can lead to a richer sense of what entropy measures.
I hope PHYS-L readers who teach about entropy will read my five-part article in the Physics Teacher, and write me if they have questions or comments. Part I is in the January 2012 issue, and parts II-V will appear one per month, February through May 2012. Thanks.