The second law of thermodynamics regards entropy and Time’s Arrow.
That is, the thermodynamic entropy in a system will always remain the same or increase.
Thermodynamic entropy can be defined in several ways, the most useful probably being the total amount of unusable energy.
Think of it this way–say you have a balloon full of highly pressurized air. You release the knot on the balloon and it flies forward, letting the air escape at a high velocity. This air bounces off of other air molecules and dissipates its energy until this energy is transferred to many other air molecules. At the same time, the pressure decreases inside the balloon and the velocity of the air molecules inside becomes the same as that outside.
You can’t get the energy back from the other air molecules and send it into the balloon. Sure, you could sort the air molecules by velocity, but that produces something called Maxwell’s Demon, and it’s been proven that Maxwell’s Demon cannot be useful because the very act of sorting would require the same or more energy to perform than you would get out of it.
There’s another form of entropy called information entropy, which was discovered in the 20th century to be related to thermodynamic entropy through some tricky mathematics. This entropy is more or less the measure of chaos in a system.
Think of a pan full of your favorite multicolored candy (maybe M&Ms or Skittles), all lined up by color. That would have a low entropy, since there would be no allowance for randomness. If you take that pan and shake it, you increase the entropy, and it makes it more difficult to tell what the state of the candy in the pan was before the process randomized them, or even what the process was.
If you emptied the pan and replaced the multicolor candies with one color of candy, you might think that would be the least entropy, since everything is perfectly ordered, but this is actually the highest entropy. To prove this, remove two candies from the pan. Now put them back. Are you sure you put them back the right way? Maybe you swapped their places. Since they are identical, there is no way to order them, and this is the least amount of information you can convey.
What does this have to do with Romans? Nothing, really. I assume that since CORRUPTION was capitalized, the author meant to suggest that entropy is a measure of corruption, but that’s really not the case, as we can see from the homogenous candy pan.
