My take, for what it's worth,
Entropy isn’t always the driver of physical change, sometimes it’s just a map.
Sometimes that map is highly isomorphic to the physical process, like in gas diffusion or smoke dispersion. In those cases, entropy doesn't just describe what happened, it predicts it. The microstates and the probabilities align tightly with what’s physically unfolding. Entropy is the engine.
But other times, like when ice melts, entropy is a summary, not a cause. The real drivers are bond energies and phase thresholds. Entropy increases, yes, but only because the system overcame physical constraints that entropy alone can’t explain. In this case, entropy is the receipt, not the mechanism.
So the key idea is this: entropy’s usefulness depends on how well it “sees” the real degrees of freedom that matter. When it aligns closely with the substrate, it feels like a law. When it doesn't, it’s more like coarse bookkeeping after the fact.
The second law of thermodynamics is most “real” when entropy is the process. Otherwise, it’s a statistical summary of deeper physical causes.
What makes entropy interesting is that you can describe many physical processes through analysis of the systems degrees of freedom. This pattern repeats regularly despite the systems being radically different.
So you can interpret entropy as being about as real as potential energy or newtons laws. Very useful for calculation, subject to evolution laws which are common across all systems - but potentially gives way as an approximation under a finer grained view (although the finer grained view is also subject to the same rules)
Just swap out "my take, for what it's worth" For "according to ChatGPT"
I don't like your comment, it's pretty low effort, and your tearing down a lot of effort that I have put into learning about physics and entropy over the years.
I came up with the psuedonym Aeonik Chaos circa 2010 because my studies of Chaos Theory and Entropy left a very deep impact on me.
I've been thinking about entropy ever since my dad, a biochemist, embryologist, and doctor told me he thought that entropy was behind the secret of life. That event was over 30 years ago.
I've been thinking about this stuff very deeply for a very long time.
So no, it's not according to ChatGPT, it's just my current take, but I don't to come out and say "this is how it is", because entropy has a way of being sneaky, I've been wrong about theories of entropy way too many times to pretend to be some authority on the matter.
Hence, this is my take, take it or leave it.
By the way, I love using ChatGPT to learn more about science and math, and have it act as sounding board for ideas. It's great for learning and diving deeper into this stuff.
I know it seems low effort but I spent a good ten minutes reading through your other comments looking for an explanation for your post. It reads as so obviously written by an LLM.
I have no doubt you're a real person, and that all those things you claim are true. Almost all of your posts are clearly written by a thoughtful human.
But then I see that occasionally, you post something that looks nothing like your other posts, and exactly like it was written by an LLM. I love learning from ChatGPT too, but I'm curious about your mindset if and when you have it speak for you here. Is the goal to use ChatGPT to educate us? If so, why not give it credit?
Everyone here knows how to use google and ChatGPT (and a majority of us could whip up a script to auto-post LLM responses). It seems like most of the internet is already "dead".. don't give it HN too, please, stick to posting thoughtful human stuff!
I use it to edit some of my posts, and clean up grammar, or to help articulate thoughts that I don't have time to give a proper third or fourth pass to.
I'm very busy these days, and will often use ChatGPT as an editor.
I'll often drop a rough draft into ChatGPT and have it clean it up, or ask or for other perspectives I might be missing.
For the comment in question, I had a spidey sense activated from the conversation. And ChatGPT helped me narrow my focus down to the different levels that entropy apply to, though I had push back on it a bit before it got to the meat of my thoughts.
I think of it as a sort of translator, it helps communicate vibes that the Striatum part of my brain is feeling/sensing, but that the verbal or symbolic part of my brain hasn't figured out to say or express yet.
Normally this process can take a while, and ChatGPT remarkably speeds this cycle up, at least for me.