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Thermodynamic entropy is a non-conserved state function that is of great importance in the sciences of physics and chemistry. [ 23 ] [ 30 ] Historically, the concept of entropy evolved to explain why some processes (permitted by conservation laws) occur spontaneously while their time reversals (also permitted by conservation laws) do not ...
It is in this sense that entropy is a measure of the energy in a system that cannot be used to do work. An irreversible process degrades the performance of a thermodynamic system, designed to do work or produce cooling, and results in entropy production. The entropy generation during a reversible process is zero. Thus entropy production is a ...
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.
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."
The statistical entropy perspective was introduced in 1870 by Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who established a new field of physics that provided the descriptive linkage between the macroscopic observation of nature and the microscopic view based on the rigorous treatment of large ensembles of microscopic states that constitute ...
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 ...
Despite the foregoing, there is a difference between the two quantities. The information entropy Η can be calculated for any probability distribution (if the "message" is taken to be that the event i which had probability p i occurred, out of the space of the events possible), while the thermodynamic entropy S refers to thermodynamic probabilities p i specifically.
The term entropy is often used in popular language to denote a variety of unrelated phenomena. One example is the concept of corporate entropy as put forward somewhat humorously by authors Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister in their 1987 classic publication Peopleware, a book on growing and managing productive teams and successful software projects ...