For more than a century, physics textbooks have explained entropy as a counting problem. Count the “microstates,” take the logarithm, multiply by Boltzmann’s constant — and you get entropy. But this picture has always left a strange gap: why should counting possibilities tell you anything about how the world actually moves?
The Ticks-Per-Bit (TPB) framework fills that gap by flipping the logic on its head. Instead of treating entropy as a static inventory of microstates, TPB treats it as a dynamic efficiency measure:
How many tiny, irreducible “ticks” does it take for a system to make one bit of noticeable change?
A gas full of molecules colliding wildly has low TPB — it generates measurable change quickly, so it has high entropy.
A crystal, vibrating but barely shifting, has high TPB — it takes many microscopic events to change anything, so it has low entropy.
In other words:
Entropy measures how good a system is at turning microscopic motion into macroscopic difference.
This might sound abstract, but it suddenly makes a lot of familiar things intuitive:
- Hot objects have higher entropy because their microscopic motion is more dynamically “productive.”
- Information theory fits perfectly because distinguishing a symbol is a physical process with a real tick-cost.
- Even black holes make sense: near the horizon, ticks pile up so dramatically that the “distinguishability budget” concentrates on the surface — the origin of the famous area law.
But the most striking feature of TPB is that entropy becomes testable in a new way.
The paper predicts that, in supercooled liquids and glass-formers, the relationship between viscosity and configurational entropy should be a straight line, not the curved relationship predicted by older theories. That’s a clear, measurable signature that experimentalists can check.
If this prediction holds — and early evidence hints that it might — then TPB provides the first mechanistic, dynamical foundation for entropy that unifies thermodynamics, information theory, quantum mechanics, and the strange world of glassy materials.
In short:
Maybe entropy was never really about counting. Maybe it was always about motion.