Sniffnoy's comment has it right. Information-theoretic (Shannon) entropy is very similar to thermodynamic entropy and they don't contradict each other as you seem to think. They don't talk about individual bit strings (aka microstates, aka messages), but rather probability distributions over them. See this wikipedia page for details. If you have in mind a different notion of entropy based on algorithms and Kolmogorov complexity, you'll have to justify its usefulness to your physicist friends yourself, and I'm afraid you won't find much success. I don't have much use for K-complexity myself, because you can't make actual calculations with it the way you can with Shannon entropy.