The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. 2002.
entropy
(EN-truh-pee) A measure of the disorder of any system, or of the unavailability of its heatenergy for work. One way of stating the second law of thermodynamics—the principle that heat will not flow from a cold to a hot object spontaneously—is to say that the entropy of an isolated system can, at best, remain the same and will increase for most systems. Thus, the overall disorder of an isolated system must increase.
‡ Entropy is often used loosely to refer to the breakdown or disorganization of any system: “The committee meeting did nothing but increase the entropy.”
‡ In the nineteenth century, a popular scientific notion suggested that entropy was gradually increasing, and therefore the universe was running down and eventually all motion would cease. When people realized that this would not happen for billions of years, if it happened at all, concern about this notion generally disappeared.
