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Not a physicist either, and I don't claim to understand entropy that well either but maybe it would help to consider that entropy may not be a universal variable of systems in the universe. I think you should rather consider it as a mathematical construct that applies to some systems where the microscopic quantities are well defined, and where the 'averaging' that we can observe is also well defined. So if you look at thermodynamics, entropy is well defined, but you may be totally right, that what we call "microscopic states" in a gas can be broken down further in elementary particles, that may or may not behave in quantic ways, and what not, and counting the micro-states considering the elementary particles is a whole different game. But it doesn't really matter. What matters is that at the scale we're at and with the microscopic/macroscopic relation that's defined, entropy works. The calculations that give some numbers to entropy show that it looks like entropy cannot decrease. They call it a universal principle of thermodynamics, because there is nothing (to my understanding), that explains it microscopically. And it works for a variety of situation in physics, such that it seems that it's a universal property of nature. But it's mostly mathematical. It seems to say that "given a system we know everything about, there is no way to go to a system that has some unknown things to us". Anyways. I mostly wrote this to see if I could articulate it to myself, hopefully it helps you as well. |