Q&A

# Post History

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posted 11mo ago by gmcgath‭

Order and disorder aren't scientifically precise terms. In this context, they're an attempt to make the idea of entropy more intuitive. A configuration could appear orderly just by chance, yet be high entropy. For example, you could roll a die 6 times and get 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 by chance. That would appear very orderly, but it wouldn't indicate a lower state of entropy than 4, 4, 3, 1, 5, 2. (Assuming the die isn't loaded or controlled, a possibility to consider if it keeps doing that.) Conversely, the sequence 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6 might seem random and disorderly to someone not attuned to math, although they're the digits to the right of the decimal point in Pi and thus uniquely determined. The same sequence, if rolled on a D10, would be random and high-entropy. It's all context.
So my answer is not to worry about exactly what "order" and "disorder" mean, except as a rough guide, and focus on formulations like Boltzmann's when you want to be precise.