the mathematics of Entropy

[kirby urner]

I'm on a physics teacher listserv out of University of Buffalo.  Not that I'm a physics teacher by trade; I joined on invitation from the late Dr. Bob Fuller, a recognized expert in physics pedagogy, who also happened to be Suu Kyi's science teacher when she was in 6th grade at a private school in Rangoon. 

Suu Kyi being a Nobel Prize winner from Burma, but much later of course.  Bob wrote a bio of his former student for Junior Scholastic, which he later continued on his own steam, adding more up to date information. [1]

Bob and I bonded over my use of "First Person Physics" as a meme and he even found NSF money to cover a trip to University of Nebraska at Lincoln, as we developed a full-fledged NSF proposal by that name:

http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2006/04/more-first-person-physics.html

Anyway, that's how I got on this physics listserv, and these days we're talking about Entropy, such an important concept to get across.

On that topic, I said this in a footnote:

On the topic of animated simulations, the physics in this one is just "too perfect" i.e. the balls would never be that well behaved.  It's as if the entropy had all been sucked out of this universe and we immediately notice the difference:    https://youtu.be/hyCIpKAIFyo  (Pipe Dream by Animusic).

Here in STEM as we call it (a culture-bound meme for sure), a goal is to collaborate across disciplinary lines, such that M helps with S, T with E and so on.  More from said listserv:

I've watched quite a few vids on Entropy of late, with one from MIT sounding more like Dr. Denker, elaborating on micro-states, which gets me thinking more of Pascal's triangle and the falling balls, the bell curve and all that.  Great museum piece!

At which point I link to another public Youtube (no need to own the book), one of several on that topic:  https://youtu.be/3m4bxse2JEQ

What connects the two videos is they both simulate balls bouncing around in a kinetic environment.  In both cases there's something unreal to the point of surreal about the videos.  In the case of the Galtonboard, the balls seem too "floaty" like we're on the moon or something.

Another Nobel Prize winner I'm only one degree of separation from is the late Linus Pauling.  I've been a semi-regular attender of weekly meetings at his boyhood home, where STEM subjects are paramount topics of conversation.  Bob got to visit the place when he came through Portland. [2]

What I'm proposing on listserv, where Entropy is already a big topic, is that we survey the Youtubes already out there and discuss them.  What vids do we like and why or think not quite on target for some reason?  How might we teach that topic differently, in the same medium?  We'll see where it goes.  I see a response just come in...

Kirby

[1] http://bit.ly/1RulTmZ  (link to Bob's project)

[2]  https://flic.kr/p/5QB1sV  (Bob, left, with Dr. DiNucci, formerly with NASA and author of 'Scalable Planning' 

http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2015/08/concurrency-again.html

[John.Mason]

You might like to have a look at Cinderella (Cinderella.de) which combines both dynamic geometry and a physics lab. Does it give reasonable animations/ I haven’t used the physics, but it does gravity, friction, elastics, bouncing and more, I think.

JohnM

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[kirby urner]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 5:29 PM, John.Mason <John....@open.ac.uk> wrote:

You might like to have a look at Cinderella (Cinderella.de) which combines both dynamic geometry and a physics lab. Does it give reasonable animations/ I haven’t used the physics, but it does gravity, friction, elastics, bouncing and more, I think.

JohnM

Yes, that looks like a very capable package.  I've been reading up on CindyScript.

Entropy is hard to fathom because of its probabilistic meaning.  Maybe information theory is the way to go.

At the moment my search is for stellar Youtubes on this or that topic, as browsing software offerings means actually downloading and evaluating, whereas my search is for a way for educators to compare notes that at least to start is more lightweight.

What mathematics videos would I assign to myself or a student who is taking on Entropy at a higher level?  I think I'll go look for Youtubes that try to talk about the Entropy of the Earth as a whole (open system) or whether that even makes sense.  A book title in the background here:  Into the Cool.

The magnetic field vids often start with the whole Earth as a magnet.  Does it make sense to talk about the Earth as a decreasing and/or increasing Entropy machine?  Given it's powered by the sun, it's not a given that its Entropy must increase.

This might be the ballpark:  https://youtu.be/7i_oCh7M9pA

Off hand, I didn't find anything directly discussing the overall Entropy of the Earth. 

Maybe that's a meaningless concept.

Kirby

[John.Mason]

Concerning entropy, what do you make of the fact that each human being takes in sensations and organises them according to the functioning of their neural network, using energy derived from food and from air. When they die, that organisation disappears.

JohnM