Get the latest tech news
What Is Entropy?
I wrote a little book about entropy; here’s the current draft: • What is Entropy? If you see typos and other mistakes, or have trouble understanding things, please let me know! An altern…
To focus the discussion I decided to tackle a specific puzzle: why does hydrogen gas at room temperature and pressure have an entropy corresponding to about 23 unknown bits of information per molecule? The reason for this is fascinating: Planck’s constant provides a unit of volume in position-momentum space, which is necessary to define the entropy of these systems. Thus, we need a tiny bit of quantum mechanics to get a good approximate formula for the entropy of hydrogen, even if we are trying our best to treat this gas classically.
Or read this on Hacker News
