Stop Saying Entropy is Disorder

Joseph Mellor
15 min readOct 4, 2020

We misunderstand entropy because we’re taught it’s a measure of disorder, but the real definition of entropy is far more useful and intuitive.

Photo by Luke Porter on Unsplash

Look, I get it. You can’t throw a textbook at someone with no formal understanding of statistical mechanics when they ask a question. An answer that someone cannot understand is worth as much to them as no answer at all. Even taking this fact into account, you

Joseph Mellor

BS in Physics, Math, and CS with a minor in High-Performance Computing. You can find all my articles at https://josephmellor.xyz/articles/.