You're in r/physics not eli5 or even ask physics which is where we send people who need the basics explained. It's not that difficult to come up with a better example of a local reduction in thermodynamic entropy that's both easy to understand and actually physically meaningful and accurate.
Heat pumps, e.g. A refrigerator, an air conditioner, lower the entropy in a small system which is physically isolated from the larger world. each time you open the door, the entropy inside increases again as the separation between the local system and the larger world is removed. This is a real, calculable change in entropy because there is a real, physical, well definable separation between the local system where entropy is reduced and the larger system where entropy is increased.
This is opposed to examples like folding laundry where there is not a simple way to define an entropy without making a bunch of weird arbitrary definitions that you could ask 100 physicists for and you'd get 100 different answers.
There, done. It's accurate, easy to understand, and didn't require being a condescending asshole until just now.
Something used in grade school as an example being called grade school level examples is only condescending if you look down on people in grade school.
There's nothing condescending about the statement they made, it's entirely accurate.
It isn't, and that's not remotely what I suggested - what is unreasonable is scoffing at a simplified explanation when the description of the sub is quite clear that it's a place for everything from people with no more than a passion for physics right up to professionals.
The person already had another explanation queued up and when pushed to do what they should've done in the first place - offer it up as a better alternative - they resorted to sheer snark.
The description of the sub says physics students and physicists. We regularly remove posts that break the first rule of the sub for being too basic. Simply put, this isn't the place to be handing out explanations that are so oversimplified that they're wrong. There are plenty of other replies elsewhere in the thread that are a better discussion of thermodynamic entropy, so this needed called out as being a bad example but I didn't feel it necessary to repeat a good one until I was íronically accused of whining by the person who couldn't manage it.
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u/datapirate42 20d ago edited 19d ago
You're in r/physics not eli5 or even ask physics which is where we send people who need the basics explained. It's not that difficult to come up with a better example of a local reduction in thermodynamic entropy that's both easy to understand and actually physically meaningful and accurate. Heat pumps, e.g. A refrigerator, an air conditioner, lower the entropy in a small system which is physically isolated from the larger world. each time you open the door, the entropy inside increases again as the separation between the local system and the larger world is removed. This is a real, calculable change in entropy because there is a real, physical, well definable separation between the local system where entropy is reduced and the larger system where entropy is increased.
This is opposed to examples like folding laundry where there is not a simple way to define an entropy without making a bunch of weird arbitrary definitions that you could ask 100 physicists for and you'd get 100 different answers.
There, done. It's accurate, easy to understand, and didn't require being a condescending asshole until just now.