entropy
noun/ˈɛntɹəpi/
Etymology First attested in 1867, as the translation of German Entropie, coined in 1865 by Rudolph Clausius in analogy to Energie (“energy”), replacing the root of Ancient Greek ἔργον (érgon, “work”) by Ancient Greek τροπή (tropḗ, “transformation”)).
7 senses
- 1A measure of the disorder directly proportional to the…
- 2Shannon entropy
- 3A measure of the amount of energy in a physical system…
- 4The capacity factor for thermal energy that is hidden…
- 5The dispersal of energy; how much energy is spread out…
- 6A measure of the amount of information and noise present…
- 7The tendency of a system that is left to itself to…
› A measure of the disorder present in a system.
A measure of the disorder directly proportional to the natural logarithm of the number of microstates yielding an equivalent thermodynamic macrostate.
Boltzmann definition
Computing, Engineering, Information theory, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences Shannon entropy
Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Physics, Thermodynamics A measure of the amount of energy in a physical system that cannot be used to do work.
- Near-synonym: unavailable energy
The capacity factor for thermal energy that is hidden with respect to temperature.
The dispersal of energy; how much energy is spread out in a process, or how widely spread out it becomes, at a specific temperature.
Computing, Engineering, Information theory, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences, Statistics A measure of the amount of information and noise present in a signal.
The tendency of a system that is left to itself to descend into chaos.
- Synonyms
- anergy, bound entropy, disgregation
- Antonyms
- aggregation, exergy, free entropy, negentropy, syntropy
- Derived terms
- algorithmic entropy, anentropy, conditional entropy, correntropy, disentropy, entropic, entropized, entropology, entropyless, entropylike, extropy, high-entropy alloy, hyperentropy, information entropy, joint entropy, min-entropy, negentropy, Rényi entropy, Shannon entropy, subentropy, Tsallis entropy, von Neumann entropy
- Related terms
- chaos