Simple Nature - Light and Matter

b/A heat engine. Hot air from the candles rises through the fan blades and makes the angels spin. c/Sadi Carnot (1796-1832) 5.3. ...

d/The beginning of the first expansion stroke, in which the working gas is kept in thermal equilibrium with the hot reservoir. e ...

h/Entropy can be understood using the metaphor of a water wheel. Letting the water levels equalize is like letting the entropy m ...

All of these examples involved closed systems, and in all of them the total entropy either increased or stayed the same. It neve ...

entropy. To emphasize the fundamental and universal nature of the second law, here are a few exotic examples. Entropy and evolut ...

Discussion Questions A In this discussion question, you’ll think about a car engine in terms of thermodynamics. Note that an int ...

a/A gas expands freely, doubling its volume. b/An unusual fluctuation in the distribution of the atoms between the two sides of ...

d/The phase space for two atoms in a box. e/The phase space for three atoms in a box. c/Earth orbit is becoming clut- tered with ...

f/A phase space for a sin- gle atom in one dimension, taking momentum into account. g/Ludwig Boltzmann’s tomb, inscribed with hi ...

h/A two-atom system has the highest number of available states when the energy is equally divided. Equal energy division is ther ...

into an ice cube sitting in some warm water! By the way, note that although we’ve redefined temperature, these examples show tha ...

it make sense that the whole thing is proportional ton? .Answer, p. 1057 To show consistency with the macroscopic approach to th ...

dependence onE 1 , so their derivatives are zero, and we find that the molecular masses can have no effect on the energy sharing ...

j/Heat capacities of solids cluster around 3k T per atom. The elemental solids plotted are the ones originally used by Du- long ...

k/An experiment for deter- mining the shapes of molecules. very sophisticated experiments could vindicate him definitively. Af- ...

matter how it is oriented. Because of this perfect symmetry, there is thus no way to tell whether it is spinning or not, and in ...

Efficiency of the Carnot engine example 21 As an application, we now prove the result claimed earlier for the efficiency of a Ca ...

as natural if we flipped it over to reverse the direction of time. Af- ter all, the basic laws of physics are conservation laws, ...

the number of possible high-entropy Big Bangs is vastly greater than the number of possible low-entropy ones. The question, howe ...

The second law of thermodynamics (page 324) The entropy of a closed system always increases, or at best stays the same: ∆S≥0. Th ...