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What is entropy? A measure of just how little we know
Exactly 200 years ago, a French engineer introduced an idea that would quantify the universe’s inexorable slide into decay. But entropy, as it’s currently understood, is less a fact about the world than a reflection of our growing ignorance. Embracing that truth is leading to a rethink of everything from rational decision-making to the limits of machines.
The second law demands that machines can never be perfectly efficient, which implies that whenever structure arises in the universe, it ultimately serves only to dissipate energy further — be it a star that eventually explodes or a living organism converting food into heat. In the summer of 2023, Aguirre hosted a retreat in the rolling foothills of a historic mansion estate in Yorkshire, England, through a nonprofit research organization he co-founded in 2006 called the Foundational Questions Institute, or FQxI. A recent study led by Nicole Yunger Halpern, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, shows how common definitions of entropy production that are usually synonymous can disagree in the quantum realm, again because of uncertainty and observer dependence.
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