Here’s a good way to visualize chaos vs order in this context. Imagine you have a thousand marbles neatly stacked in a pile like cannonballs are. That’s order. They operate as one entity. If you want to move the stack, you must move them all at once and very carefully.
Now imagine those thousand marbles all strewn about your house. They are now a thousand different entities. You can’t interact with all of them at once anymore.
You bring order back to the system by stacking the marbles again. It takes a lot of energy to stack them, and, with enough of it, you can return the marbles back to one entity.
sus@programming.dev 2 days ago
Think of a box with 4 particles a, b, c and d. If every particle is on the left side of the box, then there is only 1 way to divide them up. [(a, b, c, d), ()]
If there are 2 particles on the left side of the box and 2 particles on the right side of the box, then there are 6 ways to divide them up:
[(a, b), (c, d)] [(a, c), (b, d)] [(a, d), (b, c)] [(b, c), (a, d)] [(b, d), (a, c)] [(c, d), (a, b)]
In total you’ve got 16 possible arrangements, the 2-2 state has the “highest” entropy because you’re more likely to end up with the one that takes up 6/16 arrangements.
Maybe it’s called order because there are more ways to strew your clothes across the floor than ways to stack them up neatly in rows and there’s nothing deeper to it than that.