On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 1:24 PM, smitra <[email protected]> wrote: > > > The entropy is the logarithm of this number of states, more precisely it > is the amount of information that you would need to specify in order to > point out in which physical state the system is actually in >
Suppose you place a perfect cubic one mole diamond in a large tank of oxygen, if you know the weight of the diamond and the position of just the carbon atom at one corner of the cube then you have all the information needed to know the position of every atom in the cube (assuming you know the chemistry of carbon bonds). Now fire a LASER at the diamond and heat it up till it starts to burn, the atoms are no longer in a simple lattice but are distributed throughout the tank and 6.02* 10^23 times as much information would be needed to specify where all those carbon atoms are, and entropy would have increased. > > > Now, entropy increase only refers to the increase in the number of states > that have the same macroscopic properties. I don't understand your use of the word "only". > > > However, if you ask how many different physical states there are that have > the same macroscopic properties as the system in the final state, then you > get a much larger answer Before you burned the diamond only one microstate would produce the same macrostate, after the burn a astronomical number would. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
