The only reason they are still in business is that gasoline is so incredibly cheap. In many ways we are living on borrowed time.
Entropy in everyday life
- Thread starter wegs
- Start date
Not very much. I2R heating is the primary loss, and that can be minimized with good engineering.
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.)
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
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.
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
I'm a she, not a he.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
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
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.
RainbowSingularity
Valued Senior Member
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.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
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.
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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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?
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exchemist
Valued Senior Member
I don't understand how anyone could make that mistake.
Is it safe to say that without entropy, there'd be no order?
No worriesBeg pardon, sorry
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!
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
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.
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
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.
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
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Well is disorder "needed" for order? I suppose in the sense that the concept or order needs to be defined relative to its opposite.