Absolute entropy picture free#

No matter how messy your room gets, no matter how much you deliberately or inadvertently increase its entropy, you can never, ever beat the entropy of a room-sized black hole. Put another way, black holes are spheres of maximum entropy. One, the volume contained within black holes represents the absolute greatest amount of entropy that any similarly sized volume in the universe can have.

Absolute entropy picture free#

Since you’re now familiar with the word, you can feel free to use it: you might say that a perfectly clean room has very low entropy.īeginning in 1981 physicist Jacob Bekenstein – whose work came just shy of making us refer to Bekenstein radiation – discovered two remarkable, unintuitive facts about black holes and their event horizons. There is only one way to have this precise scenario.

You instinctively know this because there is but one singular way to have a perfectly orderly room, with a place for everything and everything in its place. Before long, you just know it will be messy again. After hours of effort you stand back to admire your handiwork, but already you can feel the sense of spooling unease in your stomach. You pick up, clean, fold, and put away your clothes. You get up on weekend morning and decide to finally tackle the monumental task of cleaning your bedroom. Whenever I see the word entropy, I like to replace it with the phrase “counting the number of ways that I can rearrange a scenario while leaving it largely the same.” That’s a bit of a mouthful, I agree, and so entropy will have to do. Entropy is one of those fearsomely deep concepts that form the core of entire fields of physics (in this case, thermodynamics) that is unfortunately so mathematical that it’s difficult to explain in plain language.