Entropy

I must admit that I never understood entropy before. I've always heard the classic 'messy room' metaphor about it, and it never really explained anything for me. Now I'm reading Decoding the Universe by Charles Seife on my Kindle. I finally understand entropy, or at least have a slight acquaintance with it. What really struck me is that this is a fundamental concept of reality. To not understand entropy is to be a flat-earther and not know it. For me, a person who conceptualizes most everything based on the Yi Jing Oracle (I Ching), there is a clear example of entropy in the mechanism of asking the Oracle a question. A small set of changes can have a very low entropy. For instance all six lines of the gua (hexagram) could come out Yang. This is common enough, but if we were to extend that run to 1024 Yang lines in succession the odds against the event are far greater than, for instance, the atoms in the known universe. So high entropy applies universally to large sets of objects (like 1024 castings of Yi Jing lines), but entropy can be 'reversed' in small sets. But then I thought of how, when a person receives a reading, the first thing they do is to interpret it. This moves the entropy back up. In the physics metaphor the material of the Yi is mixed with reality, diffusing into it until high entropy is achieved.

It is interesting in this light that the King Wen arrangement (the traditional order of the hexagrams to be found in most editions of the Yi Jing), goes from low entropy (all Yang, all Yin), to a perfect alternation of Yin and Yang in the last two hexagrams, which is the point of maximum entropy for a hexagram.

As an aside, why on earth isn't there more fanfare about Claude Shannon? The man was on the level of a Turing or an Einstein by his creation of information theory, but this book I'm reading is the first I'd heard of him (ok, so I've been living under a rock). The man created an 'electro-mechanical mouse' in 1950, that had enough AI to learn elements of a maze for goodness sake. In 1950! Another Da Vinci-level mind left us in 2001, and I never even knew about him. Sigh.