ABSTRACT
Games of chance have probably been around since prehistoric times. According to Greek tradition, dice were invented to relieve the boredom of Greek soldiers waiting to invade Troy while there is irrefutable evidence that they were certainly in fashion in First Dynasty Egypt. Round coins were also in existence in the sixth century BC in the Orient, and it is hard to imagine that they were never tossed to decide some issue involving a choice. Entropy is a dimensionless number that measures the degree of randomness in the system. Consequently, the more states that are accessible, the greater is the degree of the randomness and the larger is the entropy. The coin-tossing bridge remains valid for most situations involving atoms or molecules as individual systems. Using this bridge, it has been possible to derive atomic models for a whole host of properties of gases, liquids and solids, pure materials, alloys and mixtures.
