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Entropy is one of the few quantities in the physical sciences that require a particular direction for time, sometimes called an arrow of time. As one goes "forward" in time, the second law of thermodynamics says, the entropy of an isolated system can increase, but not decrease. Thus, entropy measurement is a way of distinguishing the past from ...
The relationship between entropy, order, and disorder in the Boltzmann equation is so clear among physicists that according to the views of thermodynamic ecologists Sven Jorgensen and Yuri Svirezhev, "it is obvious that entropy is a measure of order or, most likely, disorder in the system."
More recently, there has been a trend in chemistry and physics textbooks to describe entropy as energy dispersal. [6] Entropy can also involve the dispersal of particles, which are themselves energetic. Thus there are instances where both particles and energy disperse at different rates when substances are mixed together.
In physics, Loschmidt's paradox (named for J.J. Loschmidt), also known as the reversibility paradox, irreversibility paradox, or Umkehreinwand (from German 'reversal objection'), [1] is the objection that it should not be possible to deduce an irreversible process from time-symmetric dynamics.
For example, in the Carnot cycle, while the heat flow from a hot reservoir to a cold reservoir represents the increase in the entropy in a cold reservoir, the work output, if reversibly and perfectly stored, represents the decrease in the entropy which could be used to operate the heat engine in reverse, returning to the initial state; thus the ...
The second law has been expressed in many ways. Its first formulation, which preceded the proper definition of entropy and was based on caloric theory, is Carnot's theorem, formulated by the French scientist Sadi Carnot, who in 1824 showed that the efficiency of conversion of heat to work in a heat engine has an upper limit.
Other applications exploit that entropy and internal energy are state functions whose change depends only on the initial and final states of the system, not on how the process occurred. [6] Therefore, the entropy and internal-energy change in a real process can be calculated quite easily by analyzing a reversible process connecting the real ...
The definition of entropy is central to the establishment of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of isolated systems cannot decrease with time, as they always tend to arrive at a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, where the entropy is highest. Entropy is therefore also considered to be a measure of disorder in the ...