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| Attn. Hadji! |
by lurker69 |
2006-11-19 12:55:59 |
To pick up entropy:
(Sorry but I wasn't online the last 3 days)
Still 2 important corrections and an important use of entropy: things are going towards HIGH entropy: therefore the sun, transforming mass into energy and dissipating the energy (and mass) means going from low to high(!) entropy (leading to the "final" state I've described before.
The earth is "an (temporal) exception". Against(!) the trend of the complete universe, due to the fact that it is NOT a closed system (it receives energy from the sun and emits energy again), on Earth the entropy is going from not so very high to even lower because the energy is used to build "complex structures".
Another example: collecting gold or other rare minerals/metals.
Normally elements tend to be spread evenly over a planet (or even universe). That means HIGH entropy.
Collecting it and concentrating in one spot means "higher order" for the gold, hence LOW(er) entropy, and hence you need energy to do so.
OR: fuel, which is highly concentrated (chemical bond) energy. This is a state of "higher order" as the average amount of energy in the whole universe is lower. If you burn/combust, that bond energy is "freed" as heat; an energy form which will dissipate and then being spread (evenly) over a much larger volume. Thus with every burning of fuel (even with most endothermal chemical processes) you increase Entropy! :-)
The fun thing is that this entropy is defined mathematically: engineers use it (e.g. in the S-T diagram (S: entropy; T: temperature)) to calculate the degree of efficency for combustion engines.
Other example of local anomalies: against the trend of the universe there are areas in the milky way (our galaxy) where still today stars are born. Such a self-organization where huge hydrogen clouds collapse and form new stars (these are new "structures") is a place where locally entropy lowers itself (against the universal trend). So humans do not have to be envloved... :-)
Lurker |
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