Originated by Rudolf Clausius, the German pioneer of Thermodynamics, in 1850, entropy is a scientific expression of the degree of randomness or disorder in any system, zero entropy being a state of perfect order and high entropy being a high degree of randomness. Since disorder is inefficient, a high degree of entropy indicates the system can do very little work. The term has thus moved into cybernetics as a measure of the efficiency of any system in communicating information. If a cable or a machine produces disorder in the data, it is inefficient. The term entropy moved from science into cultural and literary criticism (notably in the 1970s) to describe states of social and communicational disorder.
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Citation: Editors, Litencyc. "Entropy". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 November 2001 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=341, accessed 23 November 2024.]
