I think people kind of ruined entropy with all that disorder crap. The simple conceptual explanation is that entropy represents the energy that is unavailable to do work. The more entropy a system has the less work it’s capable of doing, which ultimately means the less can happen within that system. Entropy always increases globally, because anything you do is something that happens and anything that happens means less energy available to make other things happen. The complex esoteric interpretations might have some conceptual value in specific circumstances, but like a lot of science communication the rigorous scientific definitions don’t get communicated, so now we have nebulous concepts like order and disorder floating around that just confuse people more than anything.
Just don’t ask us to define entropy.
I think people kind of ruined entropy with all that disorder crap. The simple conceptual explanation is that entropy represents the energy that is unavailable to do work. The more entropy a system has the less work it’s capable of doing, which ultimately means the less can happen within that system. Entropy always increases globally, because anything you do is something that happens and anything that happens means less energy available to make other things happen. The complex esoteric interpretations might have some conceptual value in specific circumstances, but like a lot of science communication the rigorous scientific definitions don’t get communicated, so now we have nebulous concepts like order and disorder floating around that just confuse people more than anything.