What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know

But despite its fundamental importance, entropy is perhaps the most divisive concept in physics. “Entropy has always been a problem,” Lloyd told me. The confusion stems in part from the way the term gets tossed and twisted between disciplines — it has similar but distinct meanings in everything from physics to information theory to ecology. But it’s also because truly wrapping one’s head around entropy requires taking some deeply uncomfortable philosophical leaps.

As physicists have worked to unite seemingly disparate fields over the past century, they have cast entropy in a new light — turning the microscope back on the seer and shifting the notion of disorder to one of ignorance. Entropy is seen not as a property intrinsic to a system but as one that’s relative to an observer who interacts with that system. This modern view illuminates the deep link between information and energy, which is now helping to usher in a mini-industrial revolution on the smallest of scales.

Two hundred years after the seeds of entropy were first sown, what’s emerging is a conception of this quantity that’s more opportunistic than nihilistic. The conceptual evolution is upending the old way of thinking, not just about entropy, but about the purpose of science and our role in the universe.

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Notions of entropy developed in disparate contexts thus fit together neatly. A rise in entropy corresponds to a loss in information about microscopic details. In statistical mechanics, for instance, as particles in a box get mixed up and we lose track of their positions and momentums, the “Gibbs entropy” increases. In quantum mechanics, as particles become entangled with their environment, thus scrambling their quantum state, the “von Neumann entropy” rises. And as matter falls into a black hole and information about it gets lost to the outside world, the “Bekenstein-Hawking entropy” goes up.

What entropy consistently measures is ignorance: a lack of knowledge about the motion of particles, the next digit in a string of code, or the exact state of a quantum system. “Despite the fact that entropies were introduced with different motivations, today we can link all of them to the notion of uncertainty,” said Renato Renner (opens a new tab), a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

However, this unified understanding of entropy raises a troubling concern: Whose ignorance are we talking about?

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In September 2024, a few hundred researchers gathered (opens a new tab) in Palaiseau, France, to pay homage to Carnot on the 200th anniversary of his book. Participants from across the sciences discussed how entropy features in each of their research areas, from solar cells to black holes. At the welcome address, a director of the French National Center for Scientific Research apologized to Carnot on behalf of her country for overlooking the impact of his work. Later that night, the researchers gathered in a decadent golden dining room to listen to a symphony composed by Carnot’s father and performed by a quartet that included one of the composer’s distant descendants.

Carnot’s reverberating insight emerged from an attempt to exert ultimate control over the clockwork world, the holy grail of the Age of Reason. But as the concept of entropy diffused throughout the natural sciences, its purpose shifted. The refined view of entropy is one that sheds the false dreams of total efficiency and perfect prediction and instead concedes the irreducible uncertainty in the world. “To some extent, we’re moving away from enlightenment in a number of directions,” Rovelli said — away from determinism and absolutism and toward uncertainty and subjectivity.

Like it or not, we are slaves of the second law; we can’t help but compel the universe toward its fate of supreme disorder. But our refined view on entropy allows for a more positive outlook. The trend toward messiness is what powers all our machines. While the decay of useful energy does limit our abilities, sometimes a new perspective can reveal a reservoir of order hidden in the chaos. Furthermore, a disordered cosmos is one that’s increasingly filled with possibility. We cannot circumvent uncertainty, but we can learn to manage it — and maybe even embrace it. After all, ignorance is what motivates us to seek knowledge and construct stories about our experience. Entropy, in other words, is what makes us human.

You can bemoan the inescapable collapse of order, or you can embrace uncertainty as an opportunity to learn, to sense and deduce, to make better choices, and to capitalize on the motive power of you. 

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Meta Value - 35

To state the obvious - have values in life. Specifically, because of impermanence meta-values are better than values. 

Most of mankind's problems arise because  (other than their inability to sit quietly even for a while) people don't value anything other than their family and cookie cutter religious, political or economic ideology.

Meta-values are something you act on every moment of your life. And this is not some abstract nonsense from historic text but what you live and breathe. Meta-values that reduce pain and sufferings on this planet. 

Have meta-values. 

Meta Value - 34

I do respect money but I conscientious of the fact that money is always just a tool not an end in itself.

In current society, money helps gain freedom if one is wise enough not to become a slave to money.

Never compromise morality for money, period.

Money’s capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene.

- David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years 

The Beautiful True Story of Helga, Harvey, and the Lightning Herd

In 1975, they might have done what Helga Tacreiter did: work on a farm. Helga loved the cows and enjoyed feeding them, snuggling them, and singing to them. And while she cried when each new group of calves grew up and got sent away, she made their lives as happy as she could for as long as she could.

Then one day, lightning struck a large tree on the farm while the mother cows were under it seeking shelter from the storm. Six of their calves survived, but they were now orphans. That meant Helga had to raise the babies, including Harvey, who had been temporarily blinded, couldn’t eat on his own, and turned in circles when he tried to walk.

Helga spent long days and nights hand-feeding Harvey and walking with him, pressed against his side. Slowly, miraculously, his vision started to return and he began to chew grass. One day, he walked in a straight line, then ran, then mooed for the first time. Helga was ecstatic. But as she was celebrating Harvey’s progress, she realized something: Soon, he and all the other calves would be sold. After how hard she and Harvey had worked, it didn’t seem fair.

Helga decided to buy the entire group, which she called the “Lightning Herd.” But where could a farmworker get that kind of money? While she was sitting in the barn one night, her back against Harvey, it came to her. Not everyone got to enjoy cow cuddles as she did – but maybe everyone could. Helga raced to the fabric store and back to the barn, where Harvey, seemingly sensing that she now needed his help, stood still for hours while she draped, measured, cut, and sewed soft faux-fur fabric into what would become the first cow-size “cowch.” Word of Helga’s cowches spread, earning her enough money to buy the Lightning Herd and a plot of land where they would spend their lives in peace.

Today, The Cow Sanctuary in New Jersey is home to dozens of animals – many of them rescued by PETA – including cows, emus, horses, goats, ducks, pigs, and geese. It’s funded by donations and, of course, sales of cowches.

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You can visit Cow Sanctuary in NJ : https://thecowsanctuary.org/

Meta Value - 33

If you want to permanently eradicate any wrongs then focus on curbing demand rather than curbing supply. 

Modern vigilantism and law is built around perpetual work of curbing supply.  

• Don't lock up prostitutes instead give long sentences and publicly shame men who go to prostitutes. 
• Lock up drug users instead of folks who sell drugs. 
• Lock up restaurants who serve and/or people who eat illegally poached non-human animal deadbody instead of arresting poachers. 
• Lock up the IMF and century old creditors who lend unpayable money to poor countries instead of arresting illegal immigrants. 
• and so on

Why Living Close to your Children in Old Age Could Be the Biggest Mistake of Your Life

True peace does not come from others. Its comes from within oneself

Christspiracy: Correcting 2,000 Years of Censorship on Animal Ethics

You can watch the full documentary online at Christspiracy

From Nazareth to the Vatican and from New Delhi to Kathmandu, the pair questioned world-renowned theologians, Christian farmers, Indigenous shamans, archeologists, and religious leaders and asked them to explain why cruelty to animals is accepted around the world, even though compassion is supposedly the uniting core principle of all world religions.

The historical texts and facts that they found—some hiding in plain sight and some deeply buried—are explosive. The new documentary Christspiracy reveals truths that many lifelong Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists have never heard. For those of us who have felt isolated and confused by seemingly conflicting values, the film offers hope: clear and compelling evidence that great religious leaders absolutely rejected harming and killing animals. This revelation has massive implications for how we conduct our moral lives.

Getting the information wasn’t easy. The filmmakers’ vehicles were chased, their homes were ransacked, and doors were slammed in their faces. Netflix wanted to censor the film. Waters and Andersen refused, and Christspiracy became the first movie ever to have its rights bought back from the world’s largest streaming platform.

Waters was forced out of his congregation after church leaders told him to stop asking questions. And his experience rings familiar to many of us. We’ve been ridiculed for our concern for animals, reprimanded for questioning what we were taught, and mocked for our discomfort at religious gatherings in which animals’ flesh is served. But we stand firm in our belief that violence toward animals is wrong.

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Happy Birthday Neo!

The little guy now is five! 

It feels like yesterday when he came home...

Happy Birthday my love; thank you for making me keep breathing within hours after Max.

Why Is the U.S. So Behind on Animal Welfare?

Why does the U.S. lag so far behind the U.K. and E.U. on animal welfare? One view is that Americans are still influenced by a Wild West mentality that tolerates the rough handling of animals. Supporters of that view point to the survival of the rodeo, which, like the bullfight, entertains spectators by mistreating animals. People who find it entertaining to watch a frightened young calf being lassoed by a rope that chokes them and then drags them to the ground are unlikely to be concerned about the suffering of pigs or chickens.

Yet when Americans can vote for laws that give farmed animals more space to move around, they do so. In 2002, 55% of Floridians voted to ban keeping pigs in stalls too narrow to allow them to turn around. In 2006, 62% of Arizonans voted to ban such stalls for both pigs and veal calves. In 2008, 63% of Californians voted to ban such stalls for pigs and veal calves, plus standard battery cages for hens. In 2016, 78% of Massachusettans voted to ban narrow stalls for pigs and veal and standard battery cages for hens, and to ban the sale of pork, veal, and eggs from out-of-state producers using these systems. In 2018, 63% of Californians voted to ban the sale of pork, veal, and eggs from out-of-state producers using systems that do not meet California’s standards. (A challenge by pork producers to the ban on in-state sales was dismissed last year by the U.S. Supreme Court.)

So I suggest that the U.S. is so far behind the E.U. on animal welfare, not because Americans care less about animals than Europeans, but because the U.S. political system is less democratic than Europe’s parliamentary system. In most parliamentary democracies, political parties are stronger and individual lawmakers do not need to raise large amounts of money to get re-elected. Money and lobbying have far greater influence in U.S. politics.

The U.S. congressional committee system also serves to disempower the electorate in a way that cannot happen in a parliamentary democracy, in which the Prime Minister and Cabinet are members of the legislature and have much influence on legislation. In the U.S., House and Senate Agriculture committees in both state and federal Congresses are usually made up of lawmakers representing predominantly agricultural districts, and they effectively have a veto on proposals to protect farmed animals. They often receive substantial donations from factory farm operators. In states without provision for citizen-initiated ballots, only tiny Rhode Island has farmed animal legislation that can compare with the E.U. or U.K. At the federal level, there is no legislation that even attempts to regulate the conditions in which farmed animals are kept.

Most Americans care about animals, and would like their country to be among the leading nations in protecting animals from unnecessary suffering. The reality is more disturbing, and I hope that people who learn the true situation seek to change it.

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Systems Thinking - Seven Thinking Skills

 

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