DanielLC comments on Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Gondolinian 19 January 2015 12:04AM

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Comment author: passive_fist 19 January 2015 05:19:50AM 1 point [-]

I'm going to disagree with you here. Not that energy doesn't depend on our models. It just depends on them in a very different way. The entropy of a physical system is the Shannon entropy of its distribution of 'microstates'. But there is no distribution of microstates 'out there'. It's a construction that purely exists in our models. Whereas energy does exist 'out there'. It's true that no absolute value can be given for energy and that it's relative, but in a way energy is far more 'real' than entropy.

Comment author: DanielLC 19 January 2015 06:50:01AM 1 point [-]

Potential energy depends on what you set the zero level to, but I agree that this is very different than entropy. In particular, the difference in energy between two systems is well-defined.