Entropy

If you know me – and you probably don’t – you also know that I like arguing extreme technicalities. It’s one of the reason I like the English language so much, and why most of the teachers I’ve studied under over my entire schooling career have told me that I should become a lawyer. Knowing this fact, it should come as no surprise to you that I get in quite a few…heated debates, to put it lightly; the most recent of which occurred, quite unsurprisingly, in the comments section of a YouTube video (which I want to make a hyperlink, but WordPress broke itself again and forces me to embed YouTube video if I choose to insert a URL. It’s here, by the way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swm8tTLWirU). I made a point that, if you had a perfectly balanced and, therefore, truly random die, entropy would rule that it would be possible to roll the same number over and over, ad infinitum. It would be incredibly unlikely, but it would be possible. A fellow commentator responded that this scenario had nothing to do with entropy and told me to, “stop trying to make entropy [my] magic bullet.” I proceeded to explain that, as entropy is the measure of disorder in a given scenario, this scenario had more to do with entropy than he thought; order would suggest that the overwhelming odds would rein true, and the fact that they might not meant that entropy was still present. The same person then explained that, since this was not a thermodynamic situation, that entropy wasn’t in effect.

I’m writing this post to point out how stupid that argument is. It would be outright redundant to invent a new term to explain disorder in all other scenarios that aren’t thermodynamic. All over the English language you see words or terms taken from other situations that are used in less specific ones now, like “psychopath” or, ironically, “random”. The reason behind this can be seen in the following old saying; “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck.” The duck of this scenario is the word “entropy”, which is a measure of disorder from the thermodynamic field when dealing with probability. Does our die-rolling scenario deal with probability? I’d say so. Are the odds stacked against the given outcome? Yes. Can the given outcome still occur? You bet. So, if it walks like entropy, and talks like entropy, why would it not be entropy?

A word, unlike an animal, can be adapted to any scenario, as long as it’s following its definition. When you say that one can’t, it therefore follows natural selection and dies, fading from use and being replaced by a word that can. So, in making this argument, you’re suggesting that the word entropy be stricken from use outside of the thermodynamic field, and eventually die out as people who are taking interest in it die, as well. Then, the rest of us have to come up with another word to accurately represent the situation. To put it in terms a thermodynamicist might appreciate more, it’s like saying a mathematical concept shouldn’t be applied to a scenario it obviously applies to because it’s not in the mathematical field. It’s a lose-lose situation, where your concept dies with you and everyone else just has to re-discover it.

This argument is stupid, and the person making it knew it. It was a last hope for them; it was full of holes and it meant that they were destined to fade from the argument. However, entropy would suggest that, despite that destiny, he could come back if I responded, so I didn’t, and let the rest of the angry people on the Internet duke it out below our original discussion. They’re still going.