Tag Archives: entropy

Thermodynamics IV: entropy

In the previous post, I talked about the second law of thermodynamics: there can be do thermodynamic transformation whose overall effect is to move heat from a cooler body to a hotter one.  Since the reverse of such a transformation (moving heat from a hotter body to a cooler one) happens naturally by conduction, the second law naturally contains an element of irreversibility which it is natural to expect is expressed by an inequality.   The quantity to which this applies is the famous entropy.

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Thermodynamics III: second law

The first law of thermodynamics says that heat is a form of energy. There is a lot of heat about!  For instance, the amount of heat energy it would take to change the temperature of the world’s oceans by one degree is about \(6 \times 10^{24}\) joules.  That is four orders of magnitude greater than the world’s annual energy consumption!  So, if we could somehow how to figure out how to extract one degree’s worth of heat energy from the oceans, we could power the world for ten thousand years!  Continue reading