|
Registered
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: St Petersburg, FL
Posts: 3,814
|
Quote:
Originally posted by Por_sha911
As far as your question about laws of Physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says (in layman's terms) that all things in nature go from an organized to disorganized state. Or in other words: things degrade, decompose, corrode.
|
Wrong ! It looks like you get a big fat F on this test. Basic science books never did a very good job of teaching the second law of thermo very well so try this one on for size.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
Quote:
|
Since its discovery, the idea that disorder tends to increase has been the focus of a great deal of thought, some of it confused. A chief point of confusion is the fact that the result S >= 0 applies only to isolated systems; notably, the Earth is not an isolated system because it is constantly receiving energy in the form of sunlight. Nevertheless, it has been pointed out that the universe may be considered an isolated system, so that its total disorder should be constantly increasing. It has been speculated that the universe is fated to a heat death in which all the energy ends up as a homogeneous distribution of thermal energy, so that no more work can be extracted from any source. Recent work, however, has cast extensive doubt on the heat death hypothesis and the applicability of any simple thermodynamical model to the universe in general. Although entropy does increase in an expanding universe, the maximum possible entropy rises much more rapidly and leads to an "entropy gap," thus pushing the system further away from equilibrium with each time increment. Furthermore, complicating factors such as the impact of gravity, energy density of the vacuum (and thus a hypothesized "antigravity"), and macroscopic quantum effects under unusual conditions cannot be reconciled with current thermodynamical models, making any predictions of large-scale thermodynamics extremely difficult.
|
http://www.entropysite.com/
Quote:
First-year college chemistry textbooks since about 1960 have used the 1898 description of thermodynamic entropy as “disorder”. In the February 2002 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education I showed that treating entropy change as “disorder” was not based on modern science and could mislead students. In the October 2002 Journal I urged that entropy be presented as the quantity of dispersal of energy/T or by change in the number of microstates.
Textbooks do not alter their presentation of basic concepts readily nor rapidly. Thus, for 12 of the following 13 texts to delete “entropy is disorder” from their new editions within three years of my calling for such a drastic change is astonishing. Further, for all 13 now to describe the meaning of entropy in various terms of the spreading or dispersing of energy (quantified by Boltzmann's number of microstates) shows the utility of this concept in good teaching.
|
Last edited by 350HP930; 05-24-2005 at 09:50 PM..
|
05-24-2005, 09:44 PM
|
|