Black Hole Paradoxes Reveal a Link Between Energy and Entropy� | WIRED

Black Hole Paradoxes Reveal a Link Between Energy and Entropy� | WIRED: Entropy, commonly thought of as a measure of disorder, counts the number of ways an object’s internal parts can be rearranged without any change to its overall state. (If a room is messy, or high entropy, for instance, you can move objects around at random and it will stay messy; by contrast, if a room is tidy, or low entropy, moving things around will make it less tidy.) By building a bridge between a black hole’s entropy, which concerns its inner microscopic ingredients, and its geometric surface area, Bekenstein and Hawking’s entropy area law has become one of physicists’ strongest footholds for studying black holes and quantum gravity.