4 Laws You Never Knew!

posted by Jack

I don’t know about you, but this election silliness has me bored beyond measure.  Neither candidate, in my opinion, are worthy of a vote for dog catcher.  So I thought I would offer up a departure from our election news and give you something of real value to know…that is, if you have an inquiring mind?  Mmmm…do you?

The 4 most important laws I bet you never knew –

There are 4 laws to thermodynamics, and they are some of the most important laws in all of physics. The laws are as follows:

First law of thermodynamics – Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms. In any process, the total energy of the universe remains the same. For a thermodynamic cycle the net heat supplied to the system equals the net work done by the system.  (Note:  Energy is what drives you, and so your energy is eternal.  Science backs up the Bible, isn’t that good?)

Second law of thermodynamics – The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.

Third law of thermodynamics – As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant minimum.

Zeroth law of thermodynamics – If two thermodynamic systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other.

Entropy defined:

• a measure of the unavailable energy in a closed thermodynamic system that is also usually considered to be a measure of the system’s disorder, that is a property of the system’s state, and that varies directly with any reversible change in heat in the system and inversely with the temperature of the system; broadly :  the degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system

• a :  the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity b :  a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder

Entropy is a very important thing in the realm of thermodynamics. It’s the core idea behind the second and third laws and shows up all over the place. Essentially entropy is the measure of disorder and randomness in a system. Here are 2 examples

• Let’s say you have a container of gas molecules. If all the molecules are in one corner then this would be a low entropy state (highly organized). As the particle move out and fill up the rest of the container then the entropy (disorder) increases.
• If you have a ball flying through the air then it will start off with its energy organized i.e. the kinetic energy of motion. As it moves through the air however, some of the kinetic energy is distributed to the air particles so the total entropy of system has increased (the total energy is conserved however, due to the first law)

Click here for the full explanation with diagrams – really fun and easy to follow too!