On 9/24/2015 12:33 PM, John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 1:24 PM, smitra <[email protected]
<mailto:[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,
Here you assume that you have only a coarse, macroscopic knowledge of
the laser, the laser power source, and the oxygen atoms which is then
the source of the entropy increase.
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.
Sure, but it wasn't a closed system. You added a lot of energy via the
laser.
Brent
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