Decay vs Entropy - What's the difference?
decay | entropy |
The process or result of being gradually decomposed.
* 1895 , H. G. Wells, The Time Machine Chapter X
A deterioration of condition.
To deteriorate, to get worse, to lose strength or health, to decline in quality.
# (intransitive, electronics, of storage media or the data on them) To undergo , that is, gradual degradation.
# (intransitive, computing, of software) To undergo , that is, to fail to be updated in a changing environment,so as to eventually become legacy or obsolete.
# (intransitive, physics, of a satellite's orbit) To undergo prolonged reduction in altitude (above the orbited body).
(of organic material) To rot, to go bad.
(intransitive, transitive, physics, chemistry, of an unstable atom) To change by undergoing fission, by emitting radiation, or by capturing or losing one or more electrons.
* 2005 , Encyclopedia of Earth Science (edited by Timothy M. Kusky; ISBN 0-8160-4973-4), page 349:
(intransitive, transitive, physics, of a quantum system) To undergo , that is, to relax to a less excited state, usually by emitting a photon or phonon.
(aviation)
To cause to rot or deteriorate.
* Shakespeare
(thermodynamics, countable)
# strictly thermodynamic entropy . A measure of the amount of energy in a physical system that cannot be used to do work.
# A measure of the disorder present in a system.
# The capacity factor for thermal energy that is hidden with respect to temperature [http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0004055].
# The dispersal of energy; how much energy is spread out in a process, or how widely spread out it becomes, at a specific temperature. [http://www.entropysite.com/students_approach.html]
(statistics, information theory, countable) A measure of the amount of information and noise present in a signal. Originally a tongue-in-cheek coinage, has fallen into disuse to avoid confusion with thermodynamic entropy.
(uncountable) The tendency of a system that is left to itself to descend into chaos.
As nouns the difference between decay and entropy
is that decay is the process or result of being gradually decomposed while entropy is strictly thermodynamic entropy. A measure of the amount of energy in a physical system that cannot be used to do work.As a verb decay
is to deteriorate, to get worse, to lose strength or health, to decline in quality.decay
English
(wikipedia decay)Noun
- I fancied at first the stuff was paraffin wax, and smashed the jar accordingly. But the odor of camphor was unmistakable. It struck me as singularly odd, that among the universal decay , this volatile substance had chanced to survive, perhaps through many thousand years.
Derived terms
* bacterial decay * decayability * decayable * decayer * orbital decay * particle decay * radioactive decayVerb
(en verb)- The pair loved to take pictures in the decaying hospital on forty-third street.
- 2009 , Francis Lyall, Paul B. Larsen, Space Law: A Treatise , page 120:
- Damaged on lift-off, Skylab was left in orbit until its orbit decayed .
- The cat's body decayed rapidly.
- Uranium decays to radium through a long series of steps with a cumulative half-life of 4.4 billion years.
- The extreme humidity decayed the wooden sculptures in the museum's collection in a matter of years.
- Infirmity, that decays the wise.
External links
* *entropy
English
Noun
(wikipedia entropy)- The thermodynamic free energy is the amount of work that a thermodynamic system can perform; it is the internal energy of a system minus the amount of energy that cannot be used to perform work. That unusable energy is given by the entropy''' of a system multiplied by the temperature of the system.''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_free_energy] ''(Note that, for both Gibbs and Helmholtz free energies, temperature is assumed to be fixed, so '''entropy is effectively directly proportional to useless energy.)
- Ludwig Boltzmann defined entropy''' as being directly proportional to the natural logarithm of the number of microstates yielding an equivalent thermodynamic macrostate (with the eponymous constant of proportionality). Assuming (by the fundamental postulate of statistical mechanics), that all microstates are equally probable, this means, on the one hand, that macrostates with higher '''entropy''' are more probable, and on the other hand, that for such macrostates, the quantity of information required to describe a particular one of its microstates will be higher. That is, the Shannon '''entropy''' of a macrostate would be directly proportional to the logarithm of the number of equivalent microstates (making it up). In other words, thermodynamic and informational entropies are rather compatible, which shouldn't be surprising since Claude Shannon derived the notation 'H' for information '''entropy from Boltzmann's H-theorem.