this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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I'm thinking about it more in a mathematical sense where the bottom system is more ordered by being more specific and having fewer analogous configurations. I'm possibly using the wrong terms here, but basically if you make a slight change to the top system, it will more likely remain analogous to the previous state than the bottom one. For example if you rotate one of the needles in the top image, it's still the same thing, but if you rotate a needle in the bottom one it no longer matches the very specific pattern that it did before.
Yes, you're just using the wrong term. Entropy isn't chaos, it's a measure of how much energy has been lost to irreversible processes such that the energy can no longer be used to do work. You can't undo pulling the tree branch into its component pieces, the process is irreversible.
The term entropy isn't wrong here, I was more referring to the other terms I was using. "Entropy" itself is heavily overloaded as a term, and some uses of it relate to information theory and combinatorics, i.e. information entropy, configuration entropy etc.
That's the reasoning I'm going by here - in those uses the entropy of a system is directly proportional to the log of possible combinations a system can have, and clearly the bottom system is a lot more constrained than the top one.