Introduction to entropy

Hey kiddo! Have you ever played with a bunch of blocks before?

Imagine you have a big pile of blocks just dumped on the floor. The blocks aren't organized in any particular way, they're just randomly spread out everywhere.

Now, let's say you decide to build a tower with those blocks. You carefully stack them one on top of the other in a neat and orderly way.

This process of organizing the blocks takes some work and energy, right? The pile of blocks on the floor had a lot of randomness or disorder to it, but the tower you built has less randomness and more order.

The amount of disorder or randomness in a system is called entropy. When there's a lot of disorder, there's high entropy. When there's a lot of order, there's low entropy.

So, the process of building your tower reduced the entropy of the block system. It went from high entropy to low entropy.

Entropy pops up in a lot of different fields, from chemistry to physics to information theory. It's all about understanding the amount of order or disorder in a system and how it changes over time.