Why Entropy Can Be Confusing (There's Multiple Definitions..)

Entropy trips people up because the word itself carries different meanings depending on context, and the semantics matter. In thermodynamics it refers to energy dispersal, in statistical mechanics it’s the measure of microstates, and in information theory it quantifies uncertainty. These aren’t contradictions but overlapping frameworks that use the same label for different facets of reality. That’s why someone can say “entropy is disorder,” another can say “entropy is ignorance,” and both are partly right. The challenge is that when the term moves across physics, chemistry, and information theory, people assume it’s describing one universal thing, when in fact each field encodes a different aspect of how systems handle options, probabilities, and information.

It’s available in The Lectures.