The great triumph of Boltzmann’s theory of entropy was that he was able to explain an observable macroscopic quantity—the entropy—in terms of microscopic components. In the examples he was most concerned with, the components were the atoms constituting a gas in a box, or the molecules of two liquids mixing together. But we would like to think that his insight is completely general; the formula S=k log W, proclaiming that the entropy S is proportional to the logarithm of the number of ways W that we can rearrange the microstates, should be true for any system. It’s just a matter of figuring out
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