Entropy is a of the most maligned and misunderstood concepts in science. You may have heard it defined as the “amount of disorder” in a system. And the second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy of a closed system always increases with time. So you might think, why should you clean your office if it will only get messier?

That may be true, but you can’t blame entropy. The messy room metaphor is often used to introduce the idea (it’s usually a teenager’s room, can you relate?), but it’s misleading. See, disorder It does not mean disorder or chaos; refers to the number of ways in which the parts of a system can be organized without changing the overall state of the system.

For example, let’s say your “system” is simply a box filled with air. Inside, at a microscopic level, gas molecules bounce around like bumper cars. Now imagine that you can map the location and speed of each particle at a given instant. That would be one possible arrangement, or microstate, but there are countless others, and they are changing billions of times per second.

Of course, you can’t really see these things. Instead, what you observe are general macro-level properties, such as air pressure; If you sealed the box at sea level, it would be 14.7 pounds per square inch. And unless energy is added to the system, say by heating it, that doesn’t change. So all of those microstates correspond to the macrostate of 14.7 psi. Get it?

In other words, entropy has to do with the link between the invisible atomic realm and the visible, measurable realm of objects, the world we inhabit. You could say that it is a conceptual and mathematical bridge between two levels of reality. I mean, come on, that’s great.

Now, of all the possible outcomes, which ones actually occur? This is basically random, so it’s a matter of probability. In fact, probability is fundamental to the idea of ​​entropy, and this is what the messy room image fails to capture. So I’m going to use a different analogy: rolling the dice. Einstein once said, “God does not play dice with the universe.” Let’s look at that, shall we?

Rolling the bones

Imagine you roll a six-sided die. You get a number from 1 to 6, right? There are six possible outcomes or states. If you roll the 20-sided die in Dungeons & Dragons, there are 20 possible states. If you want to surprise your D&D friends, you could casually comment that this die has a higher entropy, because it has more possible outcomes.

Now let’s say you’re determining a character’s abilities in D&D and you roll three six-sided dice. The three values ​​can add up to any value between 3 and 18, but the different sums are not equally probable. To get maximum skill, say, you need an 18. Well, there’s only one way to do it: each die must roll a 6.

Photography: Rhett Allain