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Jason Tanner

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  1. Jess H. Brewer 1718 Accepted Answer Community Answer

    ABSOLUTELY! 

     

    See https://jick.net/skept/Therm/ and https://jick.net/skept/Therm/Therm-pres.pdf

     

    The first step is to avoid the rabbit-hole of Classical Thermodynamics and get up to speed with Statistical Mechanics a la Boltzmann, which gives a straightforward definition of what entropy is:  namely, the logarithm of the number of different ways you can "divvy up" a given supply of some conserved quantity like energy or money. 

     

    Stat Mech has immediate implications for the distribution of populated states of different energy in thermal equilibrium -- or the distribution of wealth in a closed, equilibrated system where financial transactions occur randomly.  Both yield an exponentially decaying population as a function of energy/wealth.  You may consider the postulate of random financial transactions to be ridiculous, but then why is the actual distribution of annual incomes almost a perfect Boltzmann distribution except at the bottom (where social assistance "flattens the curve" a bit) and at the top (where nonrandom cheating extends the tail out towards infinity)? 

     

    If you master the simple notion of "more ways means higher probability", a huge number of otherwise mysterious phenomena will make perfect sense to you. 

    UTC 2021-07-18 10:19 PM 0 Comments

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