Entropy in everyday life

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by wegs, May 20, 2019.

  1. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    The only reason they are still in business is that gasoline is so incredibly cheap. In many ways we are living on borrowed time.
     
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  3. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Not very much. I2R heating is the primary loss, and that can be minimized with good engineering.
     
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  5. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    In a thermodynamic sense, yes. (Although note that zero heat is not the goal. Zero NET heat is. You can burn at a million degrees, as long as the heat released to the environment is zero.)
     
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  7. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    Yes. That would come with recovery - if there were any.

    It might have been more accurate for me to say batteries generate heat that is lost.
     
  8. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    I understand the Universe is a closed system and as such while wegs is entitled to pick what he wishes to include the Universe will still require everything to be included

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  9. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    I'm a she, not a he.
     
  10. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    While true, that's kind of like saying we have to observe any given atom decaying - in the context of the universe.
    We don't have to. We define the system we're interested in. As long as we state it, and be mindful of it, there's no reason we can't observe a system in isolation.
    The only time we really need to concern ourselves with the universe at-large is in a cosmological context.

    The Earth and Sun are pretty much a closed system as far as practical Earthly concerns go. That's the context in which wegs is dipping her toesies.
     
  11. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    So, in a closed system, is entropy transfer only from heat transfer?
     
  12. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    not when the rich don't die
    only when the poor die en-mass
    then it becomes a difficult complex problem
    as soon as the rich start to die then it becomes an urgent call to immediate arms.

    that is one of the biggest down sides to money systems.
    they have no social cultural or human morality
    meanwhile people and cultures are built up around the ideology that their should be no morality when it comes to greed and money.

    the time is not so much borrowed as made off the corpses of the poor working class.
    usa health care system affordable care act
    coal miners disease in the usa
    etc etc etc ... the list is endless

    all the oil profits are being used by middle-eastern people to pay for universal health care and fossil free city inventions.
    irony !

    you would think the west would wise up & start to copy some of those ideas, but too many hands in the till at the top.
     
  13. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    No. Entropy is not a transfer; it is a measure.

    Entropy increases for any number of reasons.
    The bricks of a house crumble.
    The leak from a gas line diffuses throughout a room.
    Marbles get mixed up.
    Cards get shuffled.
    etc.
     
  14. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Beg pardon, sorry

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  15. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Agree perhaps my pedantic side sprung up

    But also think it is of some importance as politicians and greenies sell the benifits of electric cars cars as being low energy and green blah blah blah

    No account of the energy used to produce the batteries of said cards

    Even getting the electric power from Wind Farms and other green methods do not account for the energy used to produce the Windmill Farms

    The energy put into producing a coal fired power station has a advantage of being long lasting and the cost of coal cheap

    OK wind is free, but no one mines wind and stores it to use when the real wind decides to take a day off

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    Last edited: May 22, 2019
  16. geordief Valued Senior Member

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    Is there a definitive/objective way to define "order" from "disorder" or is it in the judgement of the observer?

    For a given system is it in principle possible to assign a number that corresponds to its state of order or disorder and to track any changes in its value?
     
    Last edited: May 22, 2019
  17. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    I don't understand how anyone could make that mistake.

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  18. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    Is it safe to say that without entropy, there'd be no order?

    No worries

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  19. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    The rich do die, just like everyone else. And that has nothing to do with gas being cheap. Gas is cheap because the supply is (relatively) plentiful and easy to extract - for now.
    The US makes most of the oil profits nowadays. Irony!
     
  20. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    If we are talking about entropy then yes and no. Bolzmann's equation S=k ln W expresses the entropy S of a system in terms of the number of ways it can be arranged W.

    But in practice you have to be careful how W is calculated. It was originally intended to represent the number of indistinguishable ways the thermal energy in the atoms and molecules of a thermodynamic system could be distributed, i.e. in terms of the energy each molecular state could have. So it's a bit hairy, given that molecules have a series of quantised rotational, vibrational and translations states.

    As for tracking its value, this is obviously not practically possible to do directly, so it is done by bulk thermodynamic methods, measuring changes in energy dQ of the system, along with its temperature, and using dS = dQ/T.
     
  21. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    No. Entropy is merely a measure of disorder. It is a consequence of the statistical tendency of systems to adopt more probable configurations over time, i.e. those can be arrived at in more ways. This tendency is present anyway, due to statistics and does not rely on the concept of entropy. So it is the other way round: entropy increase is a reflection of the change from less probable states to more probable ones.
     
  22. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    Ah, gotcha. Okay, so disorder is needed for order, is probably a better way of looking at it? It would make sense, metaphorically speaking, so why not in science. lol
     
  23. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Well is disorder "needed" for order? I suppose in the sense that the concept or order needs to be defined relative to its opposite.
     

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