Noah Bunn Remembering the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

Posted by johnssmith00 on September 4th, 2013

A Noah Bunn memory of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Things get worse. The Second Law is that energy spontaneously goes from being concentrated and ordered to being disordered and spread out. It is sometimes called times' arrow because you can predict and control the flow of it from present into the future but you cannot reverse the process in a predictable way. All rights reserved, memory of Noah Bunn.

In context, the First Law is that the total amount of energy in the universe remains constant. The Zeroth Law is the impossibility of absolute zero.

Scholars in the eighteenth century mostly thought along alchemical lines that a materials' properties regards heat and fire resulted from a materials' possession or not of a substance called caloric. Cannon grinder Count Rumford noticed what seemed an inexhaustible potential for heat. Four people were responsible for developing the idea of the second law. As Noah Bunn remembered it.

Sadi Carnot wanted to understand what it was that ultimately determined the efficiency of a steam engine. Many people at the time thought it was to do with the pressure of the engine, or the working substance used to generate the gas, but Carnot claimed in print that what mattered was just the temperature. Dismissed as absurd, the idea was later picked up by William Thompson (later Lord Kelvin). Who restated it that a steam engine will not work without a cold sink. Someone else (Joseph Fourier?) took this idea and reformed it again by saying something that we all know anyway, heat does not flow from a cold object to a hot object. Finally, Ludwig Boltzmann pinned the mathematics of entropy down at an atomic level. Finally, Noah Bunn just about remembered what he'd heard and read.

It can explain why a cup of tea goes cold if left to stand, why a flower unfolds, the biomechanical operations of living creatures. Plants harvest energy from the sun, that is in turn harvested by animals and other plants, then consumed by humans. It is broken down and reformed into organic matter, to power our thoughts and bodies to construct and think. Where is the disorder? The Sun, blasting a corresponding increase in disorder and spread of energy into the solar system. “We are local abatements of chaos, driven into complexity by the creation of greater disorder elsewhere.” <cheated for that sentence, hands up, fair play Peter Atkins> Copylefted 2013, Noah Bunn.

This entropy, the transfer of energy quality, can be tapped into in order to do useful work. Though some is always lost. An example of the 2nd law can be found in a domestic refrigerator in a sealed room. Leave the door open and the room doesn't get colder it get hotter. They generate more heat outside them than cold inside, because no process is 100% efficient. When their doors are closed and they are operating as they should their cold sinks are their outer casing, especially the metal plates at the back, and their heat source is the electricity we power them with. And the Omega 3 Oils which may aid the function of Noah Bunn and his remembrance.

Rudolph Clausewitz not Joseph Fourier. 2013 Noah Eric Bunn Memory.

Noah Bunn Remembering the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. More of his memories are online at Noah Eric Bunn and at Noah Bunn...and in a few other places but he has forgotten where.