Second law of thermodynamics

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  • major reference

    thermodynamics: The second law of thermodynamics
    The first law of thermodynamics asserts that energy must be conserved in any process involving the exchange of heat and work between a system and its surroundings. A machine that violated the first law would be called a perpetual motion machine of the first kind because it would manufacture its own energy out of nothing and thereby run forever. Such a machine would be impossible even in theory....
  • application to definitons of life

    life: Thermodynamic
    ...exchanges neither light nor heat nor matter with its surroundings. A closed system exchanges energy but not matter. An open system is one in which both material and energetic exchanges occur. The second law of thermodynamics states that, in a closed system, no processes will tend to occur that increase the net organization (or decrease the net entropy) of the system. Thus, the universe taken...
    life: Thermodynamic
    ...They increase their organization in regions of energy flow, and, indeed, their cycling of materials and their tendency to grow can be understood only in the context of a more general definition of the second law that applies to open as well as closed and isolated systems. In nature (except at cosmic scales, where gravity becomes a crucial factor), energy moves from being concentrated to being...
  • contributions of

    • Boltzman

      Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann
      In the 1870s Boltzmann published a series of papers in which he showed that the second law of thermodynamics, which concerns energy exchange, could be explained by applying the laws of mechanics and the theory of probability to the motions of the atoms. In so doing, he made clear that the second law is essentially statistical and that a system approaches a state of thermodynamic equilibrium...
    • Clausius

      Rudolf Clausius
      German mathematical physicist who formulated the second law of thermodynamics and is credited with making thermodynamics a science.
    • Prigogine

      Ilya Prigogine
      Prigogine’s work dealt with the application of the second law of thermodynamics to complex systems, including living organisms. The second law states that physical systems tend to slide spontaneously and irreversibly toward a state of disorder (a process driven by an increase in entropy); it does not, however, explain how complex systems could have arisen spontaneously from less-ordered states...
  • energy transfer

    principles of physical science: Conservation of mass-energy is conserved provided that heat is taken into account. The irreversible nature of the transfer from external energy of organized motion to random internal energy is a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics.
    principles of physical science: Entropy and disorder
    ...atoms. The heating of a crystalline solid until it melts and then vaporizes is a progress from a well-ordered, low-entropy state to a disordered, high-entropy state. The principal deduction from the second law of thermodynamics (or, as some prefer, the actual statement of the law) is that, when an isolated system makes a transition from one state to another, its entropy can never decrease. If a...
  • entropy

    entropy (physics)
    To provide a quantitative measure for the direction of spontaneous change, Clausius introduced the concept of entropy as a precise way of expressing the second law of thermodynamics. The Clausius form of the second law states that spontaneous change for an irreversible process in an isolated system (that is, one that does not exchange heat or work with its surroundings) always proceeds in the...
    philosophy of physics: Thermodynamics
    ...when smoke spontaneously spreads out in a room, when a chair sliding along a floor slows down because of friction, when paper yellows with age, when glass breaks, and when a battery runs down. The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of an isolated system (the thermal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work) can never decrease.
  • Gibbs energy

    liquid (state of matter): Energy considerations
    From the second law of thermodynamics, it can be shown that, at constant temperature and pressure, any spontaneous process is accompanied by a decrease in Gibbs energy. The change in G that results from mixing is designated by Δ G, which, in turn, is related to changes in H and S at constant temperature by the equation
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