time t2. However it will no longer necessarily be a maximum entropy distribution for that new macroscopic description. On the other hand, the new thermodynamic entropy STh(2) assuredly will measure the maximum entropy distribution, by construction. Therefore, we expect: At an abstract level, this result implies that some of the information we originally had about the system has become "no longer useful" at a macroscopic level. At the level of the 6N-dimensional probability distribution, this result represents coarse graining—i.e., information loss by smoothing out very fine-scale detail. Caveats with the argument Some caveats should be considered with the above. 1. Like all statistical mechanical results according to the MaxEnt school, this increase in thermodynamic entropy is only a prediction. It assumes in particular that the initial macroscopic description contains all of the information relevant to predicting the later macroscopic state. This may not be the case, for example if the initial description fails to reflect some aspect of the preparation of the system which later becomes relevant. In that case the "failure" of a MaxEnt prediction tells us that there is something more which is relevant that we may have overlooked in the physics of the system. It is also sometimes suggested that quantum measurement, especially in the decoherence interpretation, may give an apparently unexpected reduction in entropy per this argument, as it appears to involve macroscopic information becoming available which was previously inaccessible. (However, the entropy accounting of quantum measurement is tricky, because to get full decoherence one may be assuming an infinite environment, with an infinite entropy). 2. The argument so far has glossed over the question of fluctuations. It has also implicitly assumed that the uncertainty predicted at time t1 for the variables at time t2 will be much smaller than the measurement error. But if the measurements do meaningfully update our knowledge of the system, our uncertainty as to its state is reduced, giving a new SI(2) which is less than SI(1). (Note that if we allow ourselves the abilities of Laplace's demon, the consequences of this new information can also be mapped backwards, so our uncertainty about the dynamical state at time t1 is now also reduced from SI(1) to SI(2)). We know that STh(2) > SI(2); but we can now no longer be certain that it is greater than STh(1) = SI(1). This then leaves open the possibility for fluctuations in STh. The thermodynamic