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The surroundings will maximize its entropy given its newly acquired energy, which is equivalent to the energy having been transferred as heat. Since the potential energy of the system is now at a minimum with no increase in the energy due to heat of either the marble or the bowl, the total energy of the system is at a minimum.
Due to non-predatory death, egestion, and cellular respiration, a significant amount of energy is lost to the environment instead of being absorbed for production by consumers. The figure approximates the fraction of energy available after each stage of energy loss in a typical ecosystem, although these fractions vary greatly from ecosystem to ...
This occurs spontaneously because the energy or mass transferred from the system to its surroundings results in a higher entropy in the surroundings, that is, it results in higher overall entropy of the system plus its surroundings. Note that this transfer of entropy requires dis-equilibrium in properties, such as a temperature difference.
Research concerning the relationship between the thermodynamic quantity entropy and both the origin and evolution of life began around the turn of the 20th century. In 1910 American historian Henry Adams printed and distributed to university libraries and history professors the small volume A Letter to American Teachers of History proposing a theory of history based on the second law of ...
These simultaneously transferred quantities of energy are defined by events in the surroundings of the system. Because the internal energy transferred with matter is not in general uniquely resolvable into heat and work components, the total energy transfer cannot in general be uniquely resolved into heat and work components. [96]
An organism that is twice as large cannot metabolize twice the energy—it simply has to run more slowly because more energy and resources are wasted being in transport, rather than being processed. Nonetheless, natural selection appears to have minimized this inefficiency by favoring resource transport networks that maximize rate of delivery ...
Mass–energy equivalence states that all objects having mass, or massive objects, have a corresponding intrinsic energy, even when they are stationary.In the rest frame of an object, where by definition it is motionless and so has no momentum, the mass and energy are equal or they differ only by a constant factor, the speed of light squared (c 2).
In 1913, chemist Lawrence Joseph Henderson wrote The Fitness of the Environment, one of the first books to explore fine tuning in the universe. Henderson discusses the importance of water and the environment to living things, pointing out that life as it exists on Earth depends entirely on Earth's very specific environmental conditions, especially the prevalence and properties of water.