It took me 10 years to understand entropy
I don't understand entropy and this article did not change it. The issue I take is with the definition of "the most likely state".Think of a series of random bits that can be either 0 or 1 with equal probability. How likely is it that they are all 0 or all 1? Not very likely. There is exactly one configuration. How likely is it that they have a specific configuration of 0 and 1? Equally likely. All states are equally likely. If you randomly flip bits you go from one state to another state but each one is equally likely to occur. There is no special meaning to a specific configuration if you don't give it one.If you look at the average of all bits you start grouping all states together with the equal number of 1s. If you talk about the average there is only one configuration that is all 1s but most configurations have roughly 50% 1s. If you now start flipping bits you will meander through all possible bit-states but the average will most likely be close to 50% 1s most of the time.In physics we usually look at averages such as the average velocity expressed as temperature. Therefore it makes sense to group together all states using the average and then the states with very low or very high averages are few.But if you look deeper than that averaging it stops making sense to me. It's a completely different world. I don't know what Entropy is supposed to mean on the level of individual states/configurations. I don't understand what kind of macroscopic "averaging" function we may use to group up those states. There could be more than one possibility - from that would follow that there is more than one definition of macro-Entropy. Ideally there should be one general definition of how we have to look at those microstates and from that follows our general definition of Entropy. Sadly I didn't study Physics and this topic still continues to confuse me. The usual explanations fail to enlighten me.