In complex physical systems, the interaction of internal elements is unavoidable, rendering entropy calculation a computationally demanding, and often impractical, task.

The Austrian physicist Boltzmann explained the second law of thermodynamics in statistical terms. He defined the entropy of a system based on the number of possible microstates it could assume.

In other words, systems made up of interacting subsystems have a higher floor for entropy production than a single, uniform system.

This has some pretty bizarre consequences. If you could maximize the entropy in the system, temperature becomes discontinuous—it jumps from positive to negative infinity.

Wordle players experience this process intuitively, but information scientists can quantify informational entropy to precisely calculate the bandwidth needed to transmit a given signal, how ...

“A high school student used our concept to calculate the entropy of a complex physical system: the XY model,” says Professor Roy Beck. “Although this is considered a challenging problem with ...