ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Von Neumann entropy

Okay kiddo, have you ever played with some toys that you can take apart and put back together again? Now, imagine a very big toy that is made of many small parts, like a puzzle. You can take apart the toy and look at each of its parts separately.

In the same way, scientists might study a system made of many different parts, like atoms or particles, to figure out how it works. When they do this, they use something called entropy to measure how much information they have about the system.

Von Neumann entropy is a special kind of entropy that scientists use to measure the amount of information they have about a quantum system. A quantum system is made of very tiny particles, like electrons or photons, that behave in strange ways that are different from the things we see in our everyday lives.

So, imagine that scientists are studying a quantum system made of many tiny particles. They want to know how much information they have about the system, so they use von Neumann entropy to measure it. The entropy tells them how much uncertainty there is about the system, which means how much they don't know yet.

When the scientists have more information about the system, the von Neumann entropy is lower. But when they don't have much information, the entropy is higher.

So, just like a puzzle that has many pieces, the von Neumann entropy is like a way to measure how much information scientists have about a system made of many tiny particles.