Share This Article
This is something I learned after watching this video: When a substance is in equilibrium with itself, it can also be said that energy is a form of random movement. This is especially true when that energy is moving from a positive to a negative. This is similar to the law of conservation of energy. The second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy of a system will always increase.
This may be the most important law in physics. It states that if a substance is in equilibrium (meaning that its energy is the same for every possible configuration of its particles), then it can’t have a negative entropy (meaning that it can’t have more entropy than it has). This is a big deal because entropy is how much information you have about your surroundings. The amount of entropy you have depends on the combination of your surroundings combined with each of your components.
Well, one could argue that we already have entropy, so the laws of physics are about entropy. But if we take entropy and add it to the number of particles, all we do is get the equation of state for the universe of all possible states. And it doesn’t matter what combination of the number of particles you have or the combination of your components. You can have 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 particles that get the same entropy.
And if you’re still not convinced, you can compare the entropy of your components to that of the components of the universe. The entropy of your components is a function of the entropy that the universe has. If the entropy of your components is greater/smaller, then the entropy of the universe is greater/smaller.
This means that if you have a substance that has greater entropy, the substance has a greater entropy than the universe. This is the first law of thermodynamics.
This law is true because entropy is the measure of disorder in a system. The universe, in the sense of the first law, is a system in which atoms and electrons and photons and quarks are all moving around and interacting with each other. If you look up the first law in the dictionary, youll find it talks about “the tendency for physical systems to minimize their disorder and maximize their order.
This law, called the first law of thermodynamics, is extremely important, because it tells us that the universe is a system in which entropy is greater than the universe itself. In other words, the universe is a system in which disorder is greater than the order that exists within it. When you look up the first law in the dictionary, you’ll find that it talks about the tendency of a system to have a higher entropy than the universe itself.
As a young kid I had a book that said that entropy was the same thing as disorder. Like the old saying goes, entropy is “the measure of randomness”; disorder is “the measure of order”.
I remember reading that book when I was a kid, and my thinking was, “So what, I can go around in my room and read without looking at the book?’ And then I found out that a lot of books had random pages and I couldn’t have read that then. It’s like I’m using the same words to define two different things.
There is a mathematical formula for the entropy of a random arrangement of objects that has the same meaning as the definition of entropy in the physical world. If you have a random arrangement of objects that you have never seen, then you know how many ways the objects can be arranged.