Download PDF The Second Law of Life Energy, Technology, and the Future of Earth As We Know It by John E. J. Schmitz

Download PDF The Second Law of Life Energy, Technology, and the Future of Earth As We Know It  by John E. J. Schmitz

Sinopsis

Let’s begin with a few, seemingly unrelated questions: Why does heat always flow from hot to cold? We see this phenomenon every day and consider it unremarkable, so we never wonder why it’s so. But consider a cup of hot tea sitting on a table. We all know that the tea eventually will cool down to room temperature, but why doesn’t the opposite ever happen? Why doesn’t a cold cup of tea ever become hot spontaneously, without being actively heated? Now, imagine that we place the hot cup of tea in a box whose walls do not allow any heat or material to pass in or out (we’re creating an isolated system, discussed more fully in Chapter 2), see Figure 1.1. If we wait long enough, the tea will assume the same temperature as the air in the box, and the temperature of the air in the box will go up slightly. However, the total amount of heat energy inside the box, including the cup of tea, will remain the same. Why does this happen?

Next question: Why don’t our cars get better gas mileage? Everyone knows that a lot of the energy (about 70%) contained in gasoline is wasted in the form of heat, rather than being converted into useful mechanical work that drives the wheels. That heat waste requires our cars to have extensive cooling systems, the most visible component of which is the radiator. The answer to the question of why the energy enclosed in gasoline cannot be converted entirely into mechanical energy is not obvious to us at this point.

Another question: Why does time, unlike many other circumstances of life, only go forward? Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could go backward in time and change history – our own, or the world’s? (Unfortunately, as we’ll find out, there’s a fundamental reason why we can’t.)

Essay question: Is nature chaotic, or orderly? Look at the world around you, and note how nature seems to possess two contradictory properties – the tendency to disintegrate, and the drive to organize. On one hand, it seems that everything you put in order begins to degenerate into chaos as soon as you leave it on its own. For example, let’s say you build a wall in your back yard from loose rocks or un-mortared bricks.

Then you head off for five years to study archeology in Greece and Egypt. When you come home, chances are good that your carefully constructed wall resembles the archeological ruins you’ve been studying: your structure is gone and only scattered building materials remain. Or, imagine that your son holds a can full of marbles. Suddenly he drops the can, and all the marbles tumble onto the floor. Certainly you don’t expect the marbles to somehow arrange themselves into a perfect pattern, but instead to go all over the room. So what’s the fundamental reason behind this natural tendency towards chaos? Why don’t the stones remain on top of one another indefinitely, and why don’t marbles ever form a nice pattern when they drop on the floor? Why is there always this creation of a mess?

On the other hand, nature is also a builder. Millions of years of evolution have created living organisms that are the epitome of organization – consider the genetic code in DNA, for example. It’s hard to understand how nature, which tends to be chaotic, can also exhibit such well-organized behaviors.

Bonus questions: What is energy? What is heat, and how does it relate to energy? Everybody uses these words almost daily. But can you explain the difference between heat and energy?

These questions seem simple at first, but answering them turns out to be tougher than we thought. Fortunately, we don’t have to do it ourselves. Over the last 150 years, brilliant people making similar observations, and asking like-minded questions, have actually found the answers. These answers have come together to form the concept of entropy, as explained in the theory of thermodynamics, a word derived from the Greek words thermos (“heat”) and dynamos (“force”). Thermodynamics studies the relationship among energy, heat, and work. The birth and development of thermodynamics were driven by economics – namely, the need to better understand the efficiency of steam engines. After many centuries of using the laws of mechanics to study the movement of objects in the sky6, scientists finally turned to work on more terrestrial pursuits, notably improving the performance of steam engines. While the direction of heat flows had been well known to humanity for thousands of years, the underlying description of that phenomenon – that is, the theory of thermodynamics – began taking shape only 150 years ago7. As we’ll see in Chapter 2, steam engines were among the most important drivers of the Industrial Revolution, and the new theory of thermodynamics helped explain how they really worked. That improved understanding led to better engines, which helped lower production costs and created cheaper goods, and so had a tremendous influence on history and on the quality of people’s lives.

One of the most intriguing concepts emerging from the thermodynamic theory is entropy. As a relatively abstract concept, entropy has received considerable attention since its conception in 1865 by Rudolf J.E. Clausius, a German physicist; yet it usually has been associated with mystical and esoteric thinking and has sometimes been used and interpreted in questionable ways. The fact is, entropy has a major impact in many areas of our daily lives, from the relationship of heat and labor that leads to machines which can transform heat into mechanical work, to philosophical discussions on the creation of the earth and the universe and the passing of time.

When I ask my friends and neighbors what they know about entropy, most of them admit they don’t know anything. Some vaguely remember something about chaos, but don’t know exactly how chaos relates to entropy. That’s why I wrote this book – to show you some of the truly breathtaking results of the theory of entropy – and to do it so you don’t need to know much more than high school math to understand it all.

Content

1. The Birth of a Beautiful Theory: Thermodynamics
2. So What Is All This Talk About Entropy?
3. The Science of Heat and Work: Classical Thermodynamics
4. Heat, energy, and mechanical work
5. Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
6. Perpetual motion and engines
7. Entropy and the direction of time
8. Much More About Entropy
9. Do we really understand what entropy is all about?
10. History of the acceptance of the existence of the atoms in physics
11. Statistical Thermodynamics: macroscopic and microscopic views
12. It’s all about probability
13. Connecting entropy with atoms and molecules
14. The Second Law when the systems become real
15. Entropy and the direction of time: reprise
16. Point of zero entropy and of zero absolute temperature
17. Boltzmann’s struggle with the scientific community
18. Energy efficiency and some conclusions
19. Link of Thermodynamics to Modern Physics
20. Three men and thermodynamics
21. Why couldn’t Newton’s mechanics explain everything?
22. Dark clouds for classical physics
23. Black body radiation
24. The photoelectric effect
25. The Michelson-Morley Experiment
26. The connection between the classical mechanics of Newton, the Quantum Mechanical Theory, and the Special Theory of Relativity
27. Thermodynamics at the birth of modern physics
28. Boltzmann’s heritage
29. What Planck thought about thermodynamics
30. What Einstein thought about thermodynamics
31. What Erwin Schrödinger thought about thermodynamics
32. The interpretation of time and its direction
33. Einstein’s interpretation of time
34. The influence of modern physics on thermodynamics: does relativity change entropy?
35. Entropy and Our Society, Our Culture, Our Planet, and Our Universe
36. Entropy, the Economic Process, and the World’s Environmental Problems
37. General environmental trends
38. How entropy plays a role in the economic process and re-defines concepts such as efficiency and sustainability
39. Relationship between thermodynamics and economic processes
40. Example of an economic process and the Entropy Law
41. A plea for a redefinition of efficiency and sustainability
42. Transformation of terrestrial resources from available to nonavailableSummary of entropy and economy
43. Summary of entropy and economy
44. Energy, Entropy, Life, and Heat Death
45. The contradiction between the thermodynamic push for chaos and the tremendous degree of molecular and biological organization
46. Chaos and life
47. The statistical nature of physical laws; or, to make something happen, atoms and molecules need to work together in large groups
48. Life and entropy
49. Entropy and the food chain
50. Entropy and the planet
51. Energy and Entropy of the food chain
52. Heat Death
53. The Use of the Concept of Entropy in Other Sciences
54. Entropy and electrical communication
55. A brief history of electrical communication
56. Claude Shannon, the “inventor” of modern electronic communication network theory
57. Maxwell’s demon
58. Use of the concept of entropy in other nonscientific fields
59. Entropy in the discussion of Christianity
60. The concept of Entropy and art
61. Two More Laws of Thermodynamics?
62. Another Way of Looking at Entropy
63. How Does the Gas Heat Up in the Air Pump?
64. Will Reshuffling a Deck of Cards Change the Entropy?
65. How Much Does the Entropy Change in a Case of Gas Expansion and Gas Mixing?
66. Thermodynamic Timeline
67. Can the Human Body Be Considered a Heat Engine?
68. Ways to Concentrate Energy: Nuclear Energy, Photovoltaic Cells, and Fuel Cells
69. Nuclear energy
70. Can photovoltaic cells provide the earth with a sustainable energy source?
71. How do solar cells work?
72. Fuel cells
73. Qualitative Definitions and Descriptions of Entropy
74. Some Simple Calculations and Interesting Numbers

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