I suppose Einstein’s friends told him he would be better off not inventing such new uses of terms and sticking with conventional frameworks, or people wouldn’t understand or discount the work… nonetheless.  Einstein sitting at the cafe imagining himself riding a lightning bolt, realized a relationship to time that no one else saw…

This page provides a good primer, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

On how I got where I got with my own ideas about what is occurring in our systems, and how to boil a generation down into a usable tool… albeit using the term in a way that may not have been used before…

I hope someday I can find the emails I sent to the professor emeritus who is/was responsible for http://secondlaw.oxy.edu/.

As I understand it, it took Einstein years to figure out what his insight that day created, but eventually things fell into place… over time.

There is only one problem as I see it…

I’m not Einstein, duh.

However, my intuition has given me something that I think will be figured out as revealing a new way to think about motive force, which we all know is energy and information, in space and time…

My reference to entropy is not necessarily a traditional idea… however:

French mathematician Lazare Carnot who in his 1803 paper Fundamental Principles of Equilibrium and Movement proposed that in any machine the accelerations and shocks of the moving parts represent losses of moment of activity. In other words, in any natural process there exists an inherent tendency towards the dissipation of useful energy.

Entropy is the only quantity in the physical sciences that seems to imply a particular direction of progress, sometimes called an arrow of time. As time progresses, the second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases. Hence, from this perspective, entropy measurement is thought of as a kind of clock.

Entropy is equally essential in predicting the extent and direction of complex chemical reactions. For such applications, ΔS must be incorporated in an expression that includes both the system and its surroundings, ΔS_universe = ΔS_surroundings + ΔS _system. This expression becomes, via some steps, the Gibbs free energy equation for reactants and products in the system: ΔG [the Gibbs free energy change of the system] = ΔH [the enthalpy change] −T Î”S [the entropy change]. ^[31]

Von Neumann established a rigorous mathematical framework for quantum mechanics with his work Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik. He provided in this work a theory of measurement, where the usual notion of wave function collapse is described as an irreversible process (the so called von Neumann or projective measurement). Using this concept, in conjunction with the density matrix he extended the classical concept of entropy into the quantum domain.

The concept of entropy can be described qualitatively as a measure of energy dispersal at a specific temperature. ^[43] Similar terms have been in use from early in the history of classical thermodynamics, and with the development of statistical thermodynamics and quantum theory, entropy changes have been described in terms of the mixing or "spreading" of the total energy of each constituent of a system over its particular quantized energy levels.

Ambiguities in the terms disorder and chaos, which usually have meanings directly opposed to equilibrium, contribute to widespread confusion and hamper comprehension of entropy for most students. ^[44]  As the second law of thermodynamics shows, in an isolated system internal portions at different temperatures will tend to adjust to a single uniform temperature and thus produce equilibrium.

A recently developed educational approach avoids ambiguous terms and describes such spreading out of energy as dispersal, which leads to loss of the differentials required for work even though the total energy remains constant in accordance with the first law of thermodynamics ^[45] (compare discussion in next section). Physical chemist Peter Atkins, for example, who previously wrote of dispersal leading to a disordered state, now writes that "spontaneous changes are always accompanied by a dispersal of energy". ^{[30] [46]}

Following on from the above, it is possible (in a thermal context) to regard entropy as an indicator or measure of the effectiveness or usefulness of a particular quantity of energy. ^[47]

The second law of thermodynamics says that an increase in entropy is favored…

The following is a list of additional definitions of entropy from a collection of textbooks:

“Free entropy “ an entropic thermodynamic potential analogous to the free energy.

In a study titled "Natural selection for least action" published in the Proceedings of The Royal Society A., Ville Kaila and Arto Annila of the University of Helsinki describe how the second law of thermodynamics can be written as an equation of motion to describe evolution, showing how natural selection and the principle of least action can be connected by expressing natural selection in terms of chemical thermodynamics. In this view, evolution explores possible paths to level differences in energy densities and so increase entropy most rapidly. Thus, an organism serves as an energy transfer mechanism, and beneficial mutations allow successive organisms to transfer more energy within their environment. ^[61]

After all of this and suffering from the lack of an Einstein brain…

What became clear to me as I creatively synthesized (cynthesis is the term I coined a decade ago)… many systems, stripping away literal interpretations but using them as bread crumbs, it flashed clear to me, that what was happening when we were on a Path @F-L-O-W, perhaps being in flow states, or experiences, @F-L-O-W Levels… was that the energy and information, along with space-time was "reordering the system as an altered state" and the excess energy and information actually was not usuable in that state… but it was "available" to do other things, such as "exchange" with our environments, and that environment includes our nutritional, phenomenological, ontological and epistemelogical ones, as well.

In 1982, American biochemist Albert Lehninger argued that the "order" produced within cells as they grow and divide is more than compensated for by the "disorder" they create in their surroundings in the course of growth and division. "Living organisms preserve their internal order by taking from their surroundings free energy, in the form of nutrients or sunlight, and returning to their surroundings an equal amount of energy as heat and entropy." ^[59]
What I realized was that we are nothing more than a vehicle in a quantum state of interchange…

Main article: Entropy and life

For nearly a century and a half, beginning with Clausius’ 1863 memoir "On the Concentration of Rays of Heat and Light, and on the Limits of its Action", much writing and research has been devoted to the relationship between thermodynamic entropy and the evolution of life. The argument that life feeds on negative entropy or negentropy was asserted by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in a 1944 book What is Life?. He posed, "How does the living organism avoid decay?"

The obvious answer is: "By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating." Recent writings have used the concept of Gibbs free energy to elaborate on this issue. ^[56]   While energy from nutrients is necessary to sustain an organism’s order, there is also the Schrödinger prescience: “An organism’s astonishing gift of concentrating a stream of order on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos  of drinking orderliness from a suitable environment seems to be connected with the presence of the aperiodic solids…"

We now know that the ‘aperiodic’ crystal is DNA and that the irregular arrangement is a form of information. "The DNA in the cell nucleus contains the master copy of the software, in duplicate. This software seems to control by "specifying an algorithm, or set of instructions, for creating and maintaining the entire organism containing the cell." ^[57]  DNA and other macromolecules determine an organism’s life cycle: birth, growth, maturity, decline, and death.

Nutrition is necessary but not sufficient to account for growth in size as genetics is the governing factor. At some point, organisms normally decline and die even while remaining in environments that contain sufficient nutrients to sustain life. The controlling factor must be internal and not nutrients or sunlight acting as causal exogenous variables. Organisms inherit the ability to create unique and complex biological structures; it is unlikely for those capabilities to be reinvented or be taught each generation. 

Therefore DNA must be operative as the prime cause in this characteristic as well. Applying Boltzmann’s perspective of the second law, the change of state from a more probable, less ordered and high entropy arrangement to one of less probability, more order, and lower entropy seen in biological ordering calls for a function like that known of DNA. DNA’s apparent information processing function provides a resolution of the paradox posed by life and the entropy requirement of the second law. ^[58]

Because I know what I know before I know how I know it, much as Einstein proved before he could… and did…

What I saw was patterns, where entropy, was in fact, energy and information, and that it was/is available to be uphilled "by" the environment as an exchange and "WE" are a part of that environmental portfolio of constituents.

So, without getting any more complex, a simple tool emerged… (the one I expressed to the "professor" a decade ago…)

Helpful Hint: This "free/available energy" noted as entropy, is a natural phenomena for "disorder" (key to note, as all of us are in talent, we are manic, and we disorder equilibrium as a result, which is why the flow state, level, or experience is produced… and why space-time shifts (shift in the time dimension, but also along an "arrow" of time)… and why we lose track of time passage… because we have actually disordered time, we have bent it, as Einstein realized in the nature of relativity…

Action Step: Watch your energy… (notice this employs the exchange of information in space-time)… and notice how it ebbs and "flows"… WHAT happens when you "interchange" with the environment and "feel" energized when using your talents… even developing them into strengths in more sophisticated ways… NOTICE that OTHER parts of your life disorder… as a result of the entropy produced… and NOTICE, the FREE ENERGY both used and consumed, as well as produced in a system, that has essential "reordered itself" (in the altered state)… and now needs far less energy and information to run it… because of the EES of that "order"… and notice that you are energized, and also have FREE ENERGY to give, to use for "work"<– BINGO!

What you have just done is dump more energy into your "normal" (non-talent dominated existential state (this is pre @F-L-O-W path, fyi, as we want to develop a talent-dominated path, fyi) state–and guess what? IT REQUIRES more energy:

The analysis which led to the concept of entropy began with the work of French mathematician Lazare Carnot who in his 1803 paper Fundamental Principles of Equilibrium and Movement proposed that in any machine the accelerations and shocks of the moving parts represent losses of moment of activity.

In a non-talent dominated existential state… getting it moving, and the shocks and moving parts that are not aligned, represents losses… BINGO… and what do you need to overcome these needs… more energy… where do you get it?

From talent-dominated states, levels and a path @F-L-O-W… can’t be any BS in that, or you use up too much energy in the non-talent dominated process… comprende, hehe.

Comments: Well done Mike. TPOV @F-L-O-W: Free Energy & Force of Will

I think the word “entropy” though is confusing.  I am wondering if there is a different word/metaphor that could get at your intent.

See def. below.   Just for triggers, these are partial:  Obviously, better stop, getting longer and longer.
 ———-
Def. of entropy from American Heritage Dict:

1. From Symbol S For a closed thermodynamic system, a quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not available to do work.
2. A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.
3. A measure of the loss of information in a transmitted message.
4. The tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity.
5. Inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society.