Difficulties With The Term "disorder"
In recent years the long-standing use of term "disorder" to discuss entropy has met with some criticism.
Whilst when considered at a microscopic level the term disorder may quite correctly suggest an increased range of accessible possibilities, confusion may be caused because at the macroscopic level of everyday perception a higher entropy state may appear more homogenous, more even or more smoothly mixed—apparently in diametric opposition to its description as being "more disordered". Thus for example there may be dissonance at equilibrium being equated with "perfect internal disorder"; or the mixing of milk in coffee from apparent chaos to uniformity being described as a transition from an ordered state into a disordered state.
It has to be stressed, therefore, that "disorder", as used in a thermodynamic sense, relates to a full microscopic description of the system, rather than its apparent macroscopic properties. Many popular chemistry textbooks in recent editions increasingly have tended to instead present entropy through the idea of energy dispersal, which is a dominant contribution to entropy in most everyday situations.
Read more about this topic: Entropy (order And Disorder)
Famous quotes containing the words difficulties, term and/or disorder:
“... life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man’s difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole ...”
—Jane Addams (1860–1935)
“Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the “wrong crowd” read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren’t planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“In a town-meeting, the great secret of political science was uncovered, and the problem solved, how to give every individual his fair weight in the government, without any disorder from numbers. In a town-meeting, the roots of society were reached. Here the rich gave counsel, but the poor also; and moreover, the just and the unjust.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)