![]() Chaos is when everything is evenly distributed, and order is when things are stacked up with areas of nothing and areas of lots of things. When talking about chaos and order what we mean is distribution. If you put a hot coal in a cold box then the box will warm up and the coal cool down until the box and coal are at the same temperature. If you put an ice cube in a warm box then the box will cool down a bit and the ice cube will melt. This means that energy will average out in a system. The laws of thermodynamics states that the entropy of energy in a closed system will always increase. I have always disliked the standard explanations of Entropy, they often give the wrong idea.Įntropy can refer to several different things, order and chaos, the distribution of data in a database, heat distribution in a system. TL DR: Entropy is the thing that makes a portion of energy unusable every time energy is moved. When all of the energy has reached equilibrium and everything is at the same temperature, the universe will have reached maximum entropy and will be unable to do anything anymore. When people talk about the heat death of the universe due to entropy, this is what they're talking about. All of the initial charge of the battery has been dissipated to the surroundings and is unrecoverable. Maximum entropy of this system has been reached. Eventually you don't have enough energy to lift the water at all. Try to do it again and you find that you can't even lift it the full 5 meters, but you get it as high as it will go and continue the process. ![]() You run it through the wheels and now you have only a 60% charge. You now take your 80% charge and lift the water again. Maximum entropy is reached by a system when no energy can be extracted from it - when it can't do anything anymore. There is no such thing as a truly reversible process. In order to achieve 0 entropy generation in this example, you would need a frictionless surface for the water to flow over, frictionless bearings for your water wheels, 100% efficient generators, and the water would have to flow silently and with no internal friction. Any motion (including motion of energy from hot to cold) results in an unrecoverable loss of available energy. So what gives? Why can't you get your energy back by simply reversing the process? This will always happen no matter how perfect your system is because there will always be friction involved and heat transferred whenever anything, well, happens. Furthermore, the second transaction took away another 7 cents from someone else's pocket. If you open a store and sell that candy bar for $1.00, you'll still only have $1.93. Entropy is the tax on the transaction that is energy transfer. The transaction itself cost you 7 cents, but provides no value to you. You now have 93 cents and $1.00 worth of chocolate, or $1.93 of value. Say you go to the store with $2.00 and you buy a $1.00 candy bar. That's what entropy really is - the loss of available energy in a system (or the destruction of exergy for precocious 5-year-olds).Ī better 5-year-old example: Think of entropy like a tax. You got less energy back than you put in initially. Your battery only charged back up to 80%. Here's where entropy comes in: you pour the liter through the water wheels and you're disappointed because some of the energy is missing. You buy really expensive equipment to make sure you get all of your energy. In order to do this you set up a system of water wheels hooked up to generators so that you can get your energy in the form of electricity again and put it back into your battery. ![]() The battery gets down to 30% doing this and then you decide you want to get that energy back. You run your motor using a battery that starts out at 100% charge. Say you have a liter of water and you lift it 5 meters above the ground using an electric motor. I'll try to make this as understandable as possible, but I can't guarantee that a 5-year-old will get it. Entropy is a well-understood thermodynamics concept. People love to tell you that entropy is randomness or disorder or chaos - educational TV programs fall into that trap all the time. Essentially every answer in here is incomplete or oversimplified.
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