Re: Notions of entropy

Posted by Russell Standish-2 on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Notions-of-entropy-tp7584006p7584009.html

I'd say bollocks to that. Entropy is clearly information in
disguise. That changes in it can also be related to the amount of heat
processed at a given temperature is also something that comes out of
considering rearrangements of kinetic molecular motion, and ultimately
gives rise to the well known Landauer limit on computing.

On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 02:00:35PM -0600, Nick Thompson wrote:

> At Friam today, we had our first discussion of entropy in a while.   It was
> like old times.  I really enjoyed it.  
>
>  
>
> But the following disagreement came up.   I am, I think, a bit of what
> philosophers call an essentialist.  In other words, I assume that  when
> people use the same words for two things, it aint for nothing, that there is
> something underlying the surface that makes those two things the same.  So,
> underlying all the uses of the word “entropy” is a common core, and ….
> Here’s the tricky bit … that that common core could be expressed
> mathematically.  However, I thought my fellow discussants disagreed with
> this naïve intuition and agreed that the physical and the information
> theoretical uses of the word “entropy” were “not mathematically equivalent”,
> which I take to mean that, no mathematical operation could be devised that
> would turn one into the other. That the uses of the word entropy were more
> like members of a family then they were like expressions of some essence.
>
>
>  
>
> I wonder what you-all think about that.
>
>  
>
> Nick
>
>  
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>  
>

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