Assaying Entropy I: Entropy

I found on the internet a “simple definition” of entropy:  “a measure of quality of energy.”  I can’t say I understand what that means, though I think I understand entropy.  Heat (a kind of energy) flows from hotter bodies to cooler bodies and not the other way around without putting more energy into the system.  The process is irreversible.  Refrigerators are an example of having to put electrical energy constantly into the pump in order to cool your beer down.  A consequence of this natural law (the Second Law of Thermodynamics) is that your car engine, in transforming an explosion (sudden heat) into push and pull forces, can never, by nature, be completely efficient (energy in never equals energy out).  There is always, naturally, a loss, which is the entropy of that system.  Entropy is an energy state of an isolated system; it does no work, has no physical existence, can’t be discovered experimentally.  It is simply calculated by examining the energy status of the system you are looking at.  In statistical mechanics, where the motion of elementary particles is studied in terms of their probabilities, entropy turned out to be a measure of randomness or disorder, a definition which attempts to give some graspable order to an unfathomable world (which is all science is).   In spite of the difficulties of the concept of entropy in Physics, I think entropy is something we can all easily understand.  So in order to say what I will be writing about in this series of articles I call Assaying Entropy, I will use an inexact illustration.  “Dropping the shoe” is not actually a good example of entropy, but it illustrates how energy is always lost in a way analogous to entropy.

Dropping the shoe:  Suppose you have a little seesaw with your shoe on one end and nothing on the other.  The weight of the shoe (gravity) will keep that end down and the other end up.  You hold your other shoe above the up-end of the seesaw, say 3 feet above it.  Drop the shoe.  It hits the seesaw and throws the other shoe up into the air.  How high will it go?  It won’t go 3 feet up.  And that is because of entropy.  If it could go 3 feet up, then when it comes down and hits the seesaw, it would send the other shoe 3 feet up, which in turn would come down and hit the seesaw, throwing that other shoe up, etc., over and over again.  That would be an ideal, fantasy world with no entropy.  You would have a perfect perpetual motion machine, and the mine could use it to pump their billion gallons of water a year (the seesaw looks just like those two man pumps the old horse-drawn fire engines had).  The seesaw could even power your green car down I-25 (those old fire wagon pumps were just 2-cycle engines which sucked water rather than gas when rotated).  Just think, all by dropping your shoe.

“Dropping the shoe” shows that in the real world every use of energy to do something, every act moving a material object, from making SARS CoV2 virus in your little cells to roasting green chiles over the flame, to rocketing to space, is irreversible.  Some energy is lost in the transformation of energy into moving a physical body and back again.  Recycling isolated systems (and we are speaking of cycles, not single, individual actions) is not inherently sustainable.  You can return to the original only by putting more energy or work into the cycle, like picking up the shoe and lifting it to 3 feet again.  Those who talk about sustainability should think about this, and so should the MAGA people.  You can’t go home again.

As a measure of disorder or randomness, entropy is also a philosophical concept.  Entropy simply is loss, the directionality of time.  If we could return completely to the original energy state, the world would be “orderly” and not “random.”  But because of the inevitability of a loss in every cycle of action, the real world is continually more chaotic as the universe constantly generates entropy, going from an ordered to a disorderly state as entropy in the universe increases.  Neither you nor the natural world can work without making entropy.

I will begin an irregular series of assaying the degree of chaos in our world beginning with a consideration of the pandemic and will add other essays as I am able.  While I work on my first essay, you might think about this:  The Old Testament is an embrace of entropy; the New Testament magically posits a world without entropy which we arrive at through the chaos of the Apocalypse (maximum entropy).