I like most of Veritasium’s videos because they usually explain correctly – and in a simple way – some points that are incorrect in common or standard explanations, owing to over-simplification (the video about electric current is a good example).
But this particular video on entropy unfortunately suffers from that very problem. Many statements are slightly or completely incorrect, others are so hand-waving (“energy spreads”?) as to become pointless. I hope the next one will be better.
It reminds me of a limerick by the thermodynamicist M. W. Zemansky:
Teaching thermal physics
Is as easy as a song:
You think you make it simpler
When you make it slightly wrong!
Strongly recommend James Gleick’s book The Information. Lots of bits about entropy. Pretty much the first book where I really started to grasp it.
Awh man I need to get myself a new copy of that book! I accidentally left mine on a ferry a few years ago and haven’t finished reading it.
Chaos (same author) is also a fantastic read, really got me interested in the field. I ended up taking a dynamical systems class after reading that book, and though we didn’t talk much about chaotic systems in particular I could definitely see the similarities!
I read that one way back when it came out, and it inspired many all night computer sesseon my IBM XT clone hoping my little script would produce a fractal on the screen by morning. He makes the concepts so accessible and inviting. Great writer.
The Information is available as an audiobook too - nice for a long car ride.
Definitely a great writer, and sounds like a really interesting project! Did it work?
Audiobook is probably what I’ll do in the end. I like a physical copy but it’s a bit unrealistic for me to do much sit-down reading these days.
Yup! In all its monochrome amber screen glory. It was an excuse to learn some coding, and to learn about fractals. I’d do a Mandelbrot set one night, then each night a different Julia set. I’d tweak the iterations and the function logic to see what came out. In the morning, it’d either have worked or not. It the power glitched, it was game over. I wasn’t a very sophisticated coder then.
I did a Sierpiński triangle once (I forget the algorithm, but, it had to do with drawing a random point and then another halfway between it and the previous (?) then iterate. I need to look it up - it’s been almost 40yrs…!
Actually attempting to code the stuff was absolutely an eye opener and I learned lot.
Audiobooks are awesome. We live in the Golden Age (at least as far as that is concerned…).
