full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Sean Carroll: Distant time and the hint of a multiverse

Unscramble the Blue Letters

So part of our understanding of this was given to us by Ludwig Boltzmann, an atsaurin physicist in the 19th century. And Boltzmann's contribution was that he helped us understand entropy. You've heard of eontrpy. It's the randomness, the dieorsdr, the chaoticness of some systems. Boltzmann gave us a formula — engraved on his tsmbnotoe now — that really qiuitfeans what entropy is. And it's basically just saying that entropy is the number of ways we can rrnraaege the constituents of a system so that you don't notice, so that macroscopically it looks the same. If you have the air in this room, you don't notice each individual atom. A low entropy configuration is one in which there's only a few atagrnemrens that look that way. A high entropy arrangement is one that there are many arrangements that look that way. This is a crucially important igisnht because it helps us explain the second law of thermodynamics — the law that says that entropy increases in the universe, or in some isolated bit of the usnreive.

Open Cloze

So part of our understanding of this was given to us by Ludwig Boltzmann, an ________ physicist in the 19th century. And Boltzmann's contribution was that he helped us understand entropy. You've heard of _______. It's the randomness, the ________, the chaoticness of some systems. Boltzmann gave us a formula — engraved on his _________ now — that really __________ what entropy is. And it's basically just saying that entropy is the number of ways we can _________ the constituents of a system so that you don't notice, so that macroscopically it looks the same. If you have the air in this room, you don't notice each individual atom. A low entropy configuration is one in which there's only a few ____________ that look that way. A high entropy arrangement is one that there are many arrangements that look that way. This is a crucially important _______ because it helps us explain the second law of thermodynamics — the law that says that entropy increases in the universe, or in some isolated bit of the ________.

Solution

  1. universe
  2. rearrange
  3. quantifies
  4. austrian
  5. entropy
  6. disorder
  7. tombstone
  8. insight
  9. arrangements

Original Text

So part of our understanding of this was given to us by Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the 19th century. And Boltzmann's contribution was that he helped us understand entropy. You've heard of entropy. It's the randomness, the disorder, the chaoticness of some systems. Boltzmann gave us a formula — engraved on his tombstone now — that really quantifies what entropy is. And it's basically just saying that entropy is the number of ways we can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don't notice, so that macroscopically it looks the same. If you have the air in this room, you don't notice each individual atom. A low entropy configuration is one in which there's only a few arrangements that look that way. A high entropy arrangement is one that there are many arrangements that look that way. This is a crucially important insight because it helps us explain the second law of thermodynamics — the law that says that entropy increases in the universe, or in some isolated bit of the universe.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

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Important Words

  1. air
  2. arrangement
  3. arrangements
  4. atom
  5. austrian
  6. basically
  7. bit
  8. boltzmann
  9. century
  10. chaoticness
  11. configuration
  12. constituents
  13. contribution
  14. crucially
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  16. engraved
  17. entropy
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  19. formula
  20. gave
  21. heard
  22. helped
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  24. high
  25. important
  26. increases
  27. individual
  28. insight
  29. isolated
  30. law
  31. ludwig
  32. macroscopically
  33. notice
  34. number
  35. part
  36. physicist
  37. quantifies
  38. randomness
  39. rearrange
  40. room
  41. system
  42. systems
  43. thermodynamics
  44. tombstone
  45. understand
  46. understanding
  47. universe
  48. ways