And yet if i am not mistaken, the article at the link you provide was written by Frank L. Lambert, Professor Emeritus (Chemistry), Occidental College, Los Angeles. He is deeply involved with the mission and goals of the Division of Chemical Education of the American Chemical Society.
It seems the more "complicated" version of the second law -- the one for specialists, not laymen -- is getting a critical look these days. Here's an abstract from an article by Prof. Lambert and Evguenii I. Kozliak, entitled "'Order-to-Disorder' for Entropy Change? Consider the numbers!" (from The Chemical Educator (an online journal), 1 (2005), pp 24-25):
"Defining entropy increase as a change from order to disorder is misleading at best and incorrect at worst. Although Boltzmann described it this way in 1898, he did so innocently in the sense that he had never calculated the numerical values of W using DS = kB ln (W/W0) (because this equation was not stated, kB was not known, and W0 was undeterminable before 1900-1912). Prior publications have demonstrated that the word "disorder" is misleading in describing entropy change. In this paper, convincing evidence in provided that no starting system above ca. 1 K can be said to be orderly so far as the distribution of its energy (the fundamental determinant of entropy) is concerned. This is supported by a simple calculation showing that any system with 'a practical state of zero entropy" has an incomprehensibly large number of microstates.'"
The calculation was done by K. L. Pitzer in Thermodynamics (3rd edition, McGraw-Hill, 1995. It showed "that any molar system even at temperatures as cold as 1 K has about 1026,000,000,000,000,000,000 different microstates. This is not 'order' or 'orderly!'"
Perhaps the focus on the predicted behavior of macrostates -- althugh i am sure this is practically useful in many technical applications -- is just to look at the "tip of the iceberg." In the end, the microstates "rule." (So to speak.)
Or so it seems to this layman, FWIW.
Thanks for writing, Paradox!
Ms. betty boop
That is precisely the point I thought I had made in my earlier post. To wit:
Boltzman made the observation about the second law that the disorder increased. However, this was an observation. The cause was an increase in statistical probablility. Moreover, as an observation, implicit was the boundary conditions of the original deriviation. This has been perpetually misinterpreted by by many without a physics education, including this author, to mean that the second law was cuased by a necessary increase in disorder.