A Thermodynamic Reading Of The

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of energy remains the same, but irreversible transformations within this system cause a loss in the grade of the energy. In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas realizes “her confinement" is similar to the closed system in which entropy thrives (Pynchon, 11). If she does not open her system, her energy will degrade until she is an embodiment of random disorder.
“At some point she went into the bathroom, tried to find her image in the mirror and couldn’t. She had a moment of nearly pure terror.” (Pynchon, 29). An image is created in a mirror when radiation falls upon an object of varying density, causing light to scatter, which composes the reflection. If there were no differences in density, and only random motion, there would be no image to project. Pynchon foreshadows Oedipa's fate through the degradation of thermodynamic entropy.
Mechanical energy is an example of high-grade energy and heat is an example of low-grade energy. Thus, as entropy increases, negentropy degrades ...

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used to determine speed and quantity of information transmission. It statistically computes redundant information necessary to counteract any distortion or loss that may occur during transmission from one information source to another. Aside from the semantics of information, Claude Shannon asserts that the message is selected from a set of possible messages. A system with certain physical or conceptual entities must be designed to operate for each possible selection; not just the one chosen, because this is unknown at the time of design. If the number of messages in the set is finite, this number is a measure of the information produced when one message is chosen from the ...

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