Entropy explained, with sheep (2016)
So one thing I've never understood is how you can "count" microstates, or bits required to describe them, when the relevant physical parameters all seem to be real numbers. For instance, a gas of N atoms is described by 6N real numbers (3d position and velocity) regardless of how hot it is. The article talks about quanta of energy, but that seems like a simplification at best: a given interaction might be quantized, but quanta in general (e.g. photons) exist on a real-number spectrum, so it's possible to have an uncountable infinity of energy packet sizes right? (That's the point of a black body, right?)<p>What am I missing? Is this a weird measure theory thing, where hot objects have even bigger uncountable infinities of states and we get rid them all with something like a change of variables? If you told me spacetime was secretly a cellular automaton I could deal with it, but real numbers ruin everything.