Timeline for Why do many people link entropy to chaos?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 24, 2016 at 3:10 | comment | added | Bob Bee | I took TD as an undergrad, liked it and did well but never really understood entropy. SM made it more clear in grad school, and I was amazed it was all so intuitively clear though not always easy to calculate. But to this day I find it difficult to understand some TD arguments. I am glad I'm not alone. I think you are all right, you have to go back to a better course in TD after the SM. | |
| Jun 23, 2016 at 23:00 | history | edited | QuantumBrick | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 69 characters in body
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| Jun 23, 2016 at 22:43 | comment | added | Christoph | While we're having a rant, my physics education went along similar lines. The lecturer liked to stress the idea of entropy as 'missing information'; I sat there and thought We're talking about a physical quantity that relates energy and temperature. How does this make any sense at all... | |
| Jun 23, 2016 at 22:14 | comment | added | CuriousOne | @Malkoun: You got my vote... | |
| Jun 23, 2016 at 22:13 | comment | added | QuantumBrick | @Malkoun This is what is usually is done: TD then SM. Unfortunately, in my case, as soon as you know calculus and SM you never again return to TD. Perhaps one day I'll take my chance at filling that void. | |
| Jun 23, 2016 at 21:49 | comment | added | Malkoun | @CuriousOne I haven't had a Physics education myself, but I can tell that teaching thermodynamics and statistical mechanics in the same course for undergrads is a bad idea. For a very long time, I thought that thermodynamics was kind of obscured by some old language, perhaps because it was developed a very long time ago. Something about the language they used. I think thermodynamics should be taught first, and then statistical mechanics. The first one develops the physical intuition, and the second one explains it with more mathematics and better stated assumptions (erg. hyp., etc) | |
| Jun 23, 2016 at 21:48 | comment | added | CuriousOne | Sadly, I have come away with the insight that industrial process engineers worth their title know TD usually better than physicists... to them SM is useless. They have to understand heat and material flow on a fundamental level and TD is the proper tool for that... at least in my undergrad days the physics department basically just winged it and left most of us hanging with completely insufficient knowledge. I can't claim that I ever recovered from that. :-( | |
| Jun 23, 2016 at 21:44 | comment | added | QuantumBrick | @CuriousOne That is true. In undergrad I had a subject both on TD and SM, but later on in my graduate studies I had three other subjects dedicated exclusively to SM. My understanding of TD is probably shameful... For me it looks as phenomenology with poor maths, and only SM taught me to see stuff properly. But again, I probably don't have a clue on that TD is. | |
| Jun 23, 2016 at 21:41 | comment | added | Malkoun | Yes, thank you QuantumBrick. Your comments, as well as those of fs137, are the kind of explanation I was looking for. | |
| Jun 23, 2016 at 21:40 | comment | added | CuriousOne | Entropy is quite clearly defined in thermodynamics and it does have a very clear meaning that delineates reversible and non-reversible processes. The problem, I believe, may be that we often short-change physics students by teaching thermodynamics and statistical mechanics in a single class (at least that happened to me), whereas they are actually independent and equally important in their own right. The result is that students often replace poorly developed intuition for TD with half-baked intuition from SM. | |
| Jun 23, 2016 at 21:29 | history | answered | QuantumBrick | CC BY-SA 3.0 |