Blogging the Feynman Lectures

I’m trying something new here, starting with this post: I’m blogging the Feynman Lectures on Physics, chapter-by-chapter (approximately). For those of you unfamiliar with the Feynman Lectures, they’re a classic set of introductory college physics lectures given by the great Richard Feynman 50 years ago at Caltech, compiled into book form. But despite their provenance, the books are not really introductory. They’re more like a rite of passage…

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Entropy and Billy Pilgrim

The Second Law of Thermodynamicsentropy never decreases in a closed system — is among the more famous laws of physics. If you’re reading this blog, I’d be surprised if you’ve never heard of entropy before. You’ve probably also heard that entropy has something to do with disorder, and that the Second Law basically says that the universe tends toward disorder, but that’s not quite what the second law says — entropy isn’t really the same thing as disorder, though they’re related.

So what’s entropy? To answer that, I’ll steal a little bit from Kurt Vonnegut

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