About
The character 熵 (shāng) was coined specifically to represent the thermodynamic concept of entropy. It is constructed as a phono-semantic compound, pairing the semantic radical 火 (huǒ, 'fire' or 'heat') with the phonetic component 商 (shāng) for its sound, a common method for new scientific terms. The character appears only in modern physics, with no classical precedents, and denotes the measure of energy dispersal and disorder in a thermodynamic system.
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