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Comment by raven105x | Hacker News Reader

Entropy: "to describe energy loss in irreversible processes". We have no clue about what is or is not reversible. Complex systems exhibit self-organizing behavior for no reason (that we understand), and we continue to identify more conditions under which this occurs. How does a Nobel Prize get handed out for identifying/quantifying "self-organization" http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/COMPNATS.html without bringing everything we think we know about entropy under scrutiny? Self-organization does not consume energy any more than entropic decay emits it. Irreversibility is a poor assumption.

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> Self-organization does not consume energy any more than entropic decay emits it.

This statement is incredibly wrong - this is exactly what both these processes do. We calculate chemistry reaction kinetics by including entropy terms, and optimize reactions by manipulating the entropy on one side of the equation (a classic is getting a liquid phase to precipitate out as you produce it).

I mean the reason coal can be turned into electricity is because there's a big increase in entropy going from "solid carbon in a specific location" to "CO2 diffused everywhere".

Complex systems are net increases in entropy. The water is flowing downhill, but it takes a really weird organism-shaped path to get there. Self organization is supposedly interesting because we don't know why such a path manifests. Thus far, nothing has given the second law a second's (ha ha) pause. It's not impossible, but considering most of our foundational physics is time-symmetric it makes sense to call entropy irreversible. Even if it could be reversed (and don't hold your breath on that one), it's still the cause of the arrow of time.

Welp, I suppose the author has another 10 years to work on their article about how it took them 20 years to actually understand entropy.

Entropy isn’t measuring a loss of energy, but the loss of the ability for a closed system to do useful work.

Order is often used to describe what’s going on but it’s not the kind of order we normally think of. Sufficient cold water in a warm room is just as capable of preforming work as warm water in a cold room.

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