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
- universe
- rearrange
- quantifies
- austrian
- entropy
- disorder
- tombstone
- insight
- 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.
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