The common and neutral word “and” was added as a proxy guide to the relative frequencies of the five indicated genres, which appear to be very close to each other. According to data given by Word and Phrase Info and plotted in Figure 1, the frequency of “entropy” being used in fiction, for example, is not dramatically lower than its use in academic texts.įrequency of appearances of the words entropy, disorder and uncertainty in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The wide colloquial use of entropy becomes clear if we consider the detailed information available in the over 60,000 words (lemmas) of English, based on data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), whose content includes eight genres: spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, academic texts and more. We will clarify in detail in Section 2.3 that this is a misinterpretation of the actual meaning of the term, which in fact is more related to uncertainty. The most common use of the word entropy is when a writer wants to describe, with an “intellectual” word, a kind of disorder. We can find it in literature, in poetry, in the press, and in web posts, but often its use is irrelevant to its real scientific meaning. The word “entropy” was introduced about 150 years ago as a scientific term, but later its use became common in everyday language. Such findings are contrary to the theory of ecological economics and other theories that use the term entropy in a Malthusian perspective. Historically, technology has played a major role in the development of and increase in the entropy of income. The increase in entropy is associated to increases in society’s wealth, yet a standardized form of entropy can be used to quantify inequality. Using publicly available income data, we show that income distribution is consistent with the principle of maximum entropy. As the social sciences are often contaminated by subjectivity and ideological influences, we try to explore whether maximum entropy, applied to the distribution of a wealth-related variable, namely annual income, can give an objective description. The accompanying principle of maximum entropy, which lies behind the Second Law, gives explanatory and inferential power to the concept, and promotes entropy as the mother of creativity and evolution. Hence, we contend that entropy should be used as a mathematical (stochastic) concept as rigorously as possible, free of metaphoric meanings. Exploring the history of the term and many different approaches to it, we show that entropy has a universal stochastic definition, which is not disorder. Popular imagination has loaded “entropy” with almost every negative quality in the universe, in life and in society, with a dominant meaning of disorder and disorganization. While entropy was introduced in the second half of the 19th century in the international vocabulary as a scientific term, in the 20th century it became common in colloquial use.
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