"And St. Attila raised the Hand Grenade on high, saying, 'O, Lord, bless this, thy Hand Grenade, that, with it, thou mayst blow thy enemies..

...to tiny bits, in thy mercy. And the Lord did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs, and carp, and sloths, and entropies, and breakfast cereals, and..."

Entropy: The new order

The universe gets messier every day - but can we tame the chaos? Mark Buchanan investigates a controversial new take on entropy:

CONSTANTINO TSALLIS has a single equation written on the blackboard in his office. It looks like one of the most famous equations in physics, but look more closely and it's a little bit different, decorated with some extra symbols and warped into a peculiar new form.

Tsallis, based at the Brazilian Centre for Research in Physics, Rio de Janeiro, is excited to have created this new equation. And no wonder: his unassuming arrangement of symbols has stimulated hundreds of researchers to publish more than a thousand papers in the past decade, describing strange patterns in fluid flows, in magnetic fields issuing from the sun and in the subatomic debris created in particle accelerators. But there is something even more remarkable about Tsallis's equation: it came to him in a daydream.

In 1985, in a classroom in Mexico City, Tsallis was listening as a colleague explained something to a student. On ...

Sorry for the tease from New Scientist , but I am not going to spend $4.95 to read the rest of it. Especially since it was just an excuse for another Monty Python quote.

If you would not mind spending $4.95 for the rest of the article, could you help a blogger out and post it here in a comment?