Volume 20: Pages 487-493, 2007
On the Relationship between Entropy and Information
Afshin Shafiee 1, Majid Karimi 1
1Research Group on Foundations of Physics and Information, Department of Chemistry, Sharif University of Technology, P.O. Box 11365‐9516, Tehran, Iran
In this paper we analyze the relationship between entropy and information in the context of the mixing process of two identical ideal gases. We will argue that entropy has a special information‐based feature that is enfolded in the statistical entropy, but the second law does not include it directly. Therefore, in some given processes in thermodynamics where there is no matter and energy interaction between the system and the environment, the state of the system may go toward a situation of lower probability to increase the observer's information about the environment. This is a kind of information‐based interaction in which the total entropy is not constrained by the second law.
Keywords: entropy, second law of thermodynamics, Gibbs paradox, information‐based interaction
Received: March 7, 2007; Published Online: May 26, 2009