entropy distribution in the universe

[forufes]

entropy is chaos, disorder.

 

in a closed system, entropy should remain the same or increase.

 

if we take the universe as our closed system, entropy should be the same or increasing...

 

however, entropy on earth has decreased by the evolution of living organisms.

 

that should be balanced off by more disorder in other parts of the closed system, i.e, the universe.

 

have such decrease in order been observed? any theories?

[Greippi]

entropy is chaos, disorder.

I suppose you could loosely describe it as such.

 

however, entropy on earth has decreased by the evolution of living organisms.

 

 

Really? The diversity created by evolution is surely an increase in entropy.

The processes within a living cell are all thermodynamically viable, satisfying the laws related to entropy.

[forufes]

I suppose you could loosely describe it as such.

which seems not to be enough, considering this;

Really? The diversity created by evolution is surely an increase in entropy.

i'm sorry, i couldn't interpret that sentence to be right in any way, if you can enlighten me, please do.

are you saying that the earth of rocks and seas only a million million years back had less disorder(entropy) than today's world?

The processes within a living cell are all thermodynamically viable, satisfying the laws related to entropy.

i didn't say they weren't, but the simple fact is entropy cannot decrease in a closed system isn't contradicted by cells, as they are NOT closed systems.

IF cells were closed systems, IF earth was a closed system, they would both die, in other words, dear ol'entropy will increase.

 

since they are alive, growing, ravishing, prospering, advancing in complexity and order, they are decreasing entropy, that's no big deal, as the sun gets energy through to earth, which is thermodynamically viable...

BUT..

 

zoom out, and take the universe as the closed system(that's how it's taken scientifically, no?), within this huge closed system, entropy should remain constant, the localized decrease in entropy in earth must be balanced by an increase of entropy in other areas.

my question is;"such as?"

 

i thought black holes and stars exploding, but hey, they form into stars as well.

 

in the milky way, the sun is dying, it is "giving its life" to earth, if i explain life by energy, then yeah, it's equivalent trade, but entropy wise, it sure isn't equivalent(i could be wrong here).

 

is the rate at which systems in the universe die(and increase entropy) what balances out the decrease in earth?

 

is there another earth somewhere dying and we're living off of it:D?

 

what scientific theories explore the compensation of decreased entropy on earth, for the closed system "the universe"?

 

 

now, it seems very crucial for me to grasp the concept of evolution clearly, which i can't seem to be able to do, i've done some research, and they seem to try and explain it with one of the following:

 

(broadly speaking):

1-entropy is the increase of heat emissions

like ice melting(wiki) or our bodies radiating heat in a room, both increasing the entropy of a room

(as in, having ice cubes in an warm isolated room, is more "ordered" than having melted ice in a slightly warmer room, you can't inverse the heat from the water to the air to go back to state one(ice cubes) unless you supply work)

 

2-entropy is simply old fashioned order.

like if i have two rooms with a door between them, one is full of gas the other vacuum, that's state one, when i open the door gas will fill the other room that's state two, the two rooms are isolated, there was no heat or work transfer, energy of state one is energy of state two...

 

yet, entropy has increased:eek:

displayed in that you can't take it back to state one unless you violate it being a closed system and supply work.

 

3-entropy is inevitable energy loss, due to practical inefficiency in any process in real life.

efficiency of any engine or process can never be 100%, but thermodynamics has given inventors the benefit of the doubt by allowing entropy to remain constant(if efficiency ever DID reach 100%), and mostly increasing depending on how inefficient a process is.

it has also allowed isentropic(constant entropy) processes to join the heavenly "ideal" bunch of concepts, to make life easier for students in their calculations, and to set an example for the rest of the concepts:D.

 

so which is closest to be correct?

[J.C.MacSwell]

entropy is chaos, disorder.

 

in a closed system, entropy should remain the same or increase.

 

if we take the universe as our closed system, entropy should be the same or increasing...

 

however, entropy on earth has decreased by the evolution of living organisms.

 

that should be balanced off by more disorder in other parts of the closed system, i.e, the universe.

 

have such decrease in order been observed? any theories?

 

The entropy of the Earth may be higher or lower than in the past.

 

The Sun's has certainly increased, by much more than any difference.

[Mr Skeptic]

entropy is chaos, disorder.

 

in a closed system, entropy should remain the same or increase.

 

if we take the universe as our closed system, entropy should be the same or increasing...

 

however, entropy on earth has decreased by the evolution of living organisms.

 

All correct.

 

that should be balanced off by more disorder in other parts of the closed system, i.e, the universe.

 

have such decrease in order been observed? any theories?

 

Yes. The sun spits out energy throughout the universe, increasing the universe's entropy. Life just slowed the rate of entropy increase, but did not overall reverse it, as required.

[1bobwhite]

forufes,

 

When it comes to living things, the earth can't be considered to be in a closed system, and therefore entropy can't be applied to the determination of the degree of order.

 

Living things and life force imply a Creator, which is not allowed in the considering of closed systems.

 

However if the life issue is ignored, and a closed system is allowed, then the state of entropy may be considered.

 

This has nothing to do with religious beliefs.

Bob

[forufes]

 

This has nothing to do with religious beliefs.

ouch man... i know.

 

now what exactly are you saying?

 

entropy is decreasing on earth, that can't happen UNLESS it was an open system(which it is).

 

now albeit it being an open system that is reducing entropy and absorbing energy(heat), there has to be a balancing entropy increase in the rest of the cosmos, i'm asking about the forms such increase may take, if any were observed, theorized or anything.

 

i can't quite understand an answer if it's given or properly ask it till i grasp the concept or definition of entropy more, i'm gaining progress, and i'll be back with better phrasing for this whole thing (i hope:embarass:)

[Mr Skeptic]

entropy is decreasing on earth,

 

Source please.

 

I would think that entropy is increasing on Earth, due to us burning more coal and oil than is being formed.

[1bobwhite]

forufes,

 

The term entropy may be used in different contexts to describe in mathematical terms the degree of which natural changes proceed toward their natural completion. This can be for instance, how much a football stadium seating fills up before the kickoff, or how fast the stadium clears after the game.

 

In the descriptions of thermodynamics, the parameters are defined within which to describe the effects, thus the term "closed system" is used to define the boundaries within which the argument may be plied with the formulas, in order to have an understandable result.

 

For an example; you are going to do an experiment on a table in the center of the room. You have all your apparatus, and notes, and everything you need ready for the experiment to begin.

 

Your experiment is a simple one that will start with your momentary input to initiate the action, after which it will proceed to completion on its own.

 

Now the entropy of the experiment is the description of how complete the experiment is. But in order to be a proper determination, a closed system has to be defined. The closed system is in this case: the door to the room is closed so no outside influences can affect it; no tampering with anything of the experiment until its completion.

 

An open system would be: the door to the room is open so that air drafts, people walking in and out, outside noise, etc., may affect the experiment; other people and yourself make little tweeks to the apparatus and components that affect the progression of the experiment.

 

As you can see, the open system would make the term entropy meaningless because the results for the original experiment parameters could not be determined. Thats why the term "closed system" has to be applied.

 

How can someone determine how messy your room really is while you're home since it naturally tends toward total disorder (the entropy of your room, total disaster, entropy 100%), if your mother keeps coming in and straightening up (your room totally in order, entropy 0%), before your friends get there?

Bob

---

Merged post follows:

Consecutive posts merged

forufes,

 

Entropy, in thermodynamics, is a measure of the unavailability of a system’s energy to do work. Wikipedia.

 

Reminds me of: Entropy, in teenagers, is a measure of the unavailability of their system’s energy to do work. :rolleyes:Bob

Edited May 16, 2010 by 1bobwhite
closer define

[forufes]

thanks bob. and mr skeptic, while you have a point, i'm not sure that entropy is decreasing on earth, but i think it's fairly reasonable if not obvious that with the development of all lifeforms on earth, bacteria alone, would make up for any heat generation and energy consumption earth is undergoing.

 

entropy is the availability of unusable energy, with the simple realization that life forms start as unusable or limitedly usable forms of energy (mass), and turn into highly efficient energy forms that can produce lots of work and can supply other forms of energy other than heat(the least usable), is a big decrease in entropy.

 

think of all the animals, insects and fish, account for the decrease in entropy per each one, and i think it would be clear.

 

 

but here i have another fundamental question about entropy, it's as wiki says

More precisely, in any process where the system gives up energy ΔE, and its entropy falls by ΔS, a quantity at least TR ΔS of that energy must be given up to the system's surroundings as unusable heat (TR is the temperature of the system's external surroundings).

they keep stating that unusable energy is synonymous with heat, but can't that be turned into electricity for example?

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/silicon-nanowires-turn-heat-to-electricity

http://www.rvmobile.com/TECH/TROUBLE/Tcouple.htm

Edited June 2, 2010 by forufes

[Mr Skeptic]

think of all the animals, insects and fish, account for the decrease in entropy per each one, and i think it would be clear.

 

I did -- check the CO2 levels. Biomass can't be increasing by that much, or coal would be a renewable resource.

 

but here i have another fundamental question about entropy, it's as wiki says

 

they keep stating that unusable energy is synonymous with heat, but can't that be turned into electricity for example?

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/silicon-nanowires-turn-heat-to-electricity

http://www.rvmobile.com/TECH/TROUBLE/Tcouple.htm

 

Yes and no. Whenever you have a temperature difference, you can extract work by transferring the heat from the hot to the cold. If you have no temperature difference, then no matter how hot it is you can't extract work from it.

[forufes]

Ok!!

I'm back, with more contradictions than ever(otherwise called questions) :

 

1- how does somebody make go between the first and second definitions to entropy i gave previously (which are both valid)? In other words, entropy is defined by the heat transfer crossing a system's boundery divided by the temperature of either the system or the surroundings.

Now for the adiabatic container partitioned into vacuum and gas halves. It has low entropy, when we remove the partition the entropy or disorder will increase, EVEN THOUGH THERE WAS NO HEAT TRANSFER, so the entropy according to the formula should equal zero, yet it is not, i know the other formulas which are used to compute the entropy in this situation, but i still think it should equal zero, because that's what the first and most basic formula would yield.

In other words yet, how is the disorder nature of entropy expressed in terms of the first heat formula?(which i finally got to grasp).. And i'm not talking about the ideal gas entropy derivations nor the statistical or information entropy(which all are logical but not supported with solid enough math to be considered science imo).

 

2-when heat leaves a system its entropy decreases, and vice versa. Then how is the sun sending off heat to earth supposed to compensate for the decrease by evolution of living beings? In other words heat should be crossing earth's boundery out for entropy to decrease, and not freaking vice versa.

Same goes to the sun, it's getting rid of its heat, so shouldn't its entropy decrease as well?

 

 

that's it for now, i'll be back later:-)

[Mr Skeptic]

1) Entropy relates to the number of states (possible arrangements) of a system. Temperature is just one of the components of this. Incidentally, in thermodynamics, "heat" is the transfer of energy that isn't work, regardless of whether it is thermal energy or not.

 

2) The sun produces energy in a nice concentrated form (the sun). This then radiates throughout space, becoming less concentrated and more entropic. Normally, sunlight would get absorbed by a molecule and become thermal energy. However, life uses special molecules such as chlorophyll, to force that energy to do work. Since work is not heat and energy is conserved, this decreases heat transfer and therefore decreases entropy, compared to what would have happened otherwise. There's no actual decrease in entropy overall, but the increase in entropy is delayed because some of that energy is stored in biomass.

 

Of course, biomass isn't absorbing all that energy so it can sit around and do nothing. The energy is used to do work, a process that increases overall entropy. However, doing work one can decrease local entropy, as in the case of a refrigerator or life.

[forufes]

your last answers would require me to sit quietly and tackle them, by now i remembered some other questions;

I did -- check the CO2 levels. Biomass can't be increasing by that much, or coal would be a renewable resource.

but not all carcasses turn into coal, neither do they to oil.

besides, can't the bio mass contain very low entropy(as in highly complex structure, which is the case) enough to make up and even surpass the increase in the rest of the earth, even though the volume of the latter is bigger?

 

it's like a paper with a word written on it has less entropy than a paper soaked in ink...[?]

isn't there something like, "entropy quality", which would be a measure of the density of irreversibility and complexity?

[ i just thought of irreducible complexity, and how some people assert that "there is no being that is more advanced than another, each to his own needs is most advanced", but i think we can introduce entropy as a gauge for that, no?]

 

also upon re-reading answer 1, you're saying that S = dQ/T is actually a special formula for only one type of measurement to a system's set of possible states??

would that make Boltzmann's equation more general?

 

guess that leaves me with a biology review for the earth part in the 2nd question, but for the sun part, you're saying the sun releases a highly "ordered" form of energy(meaning low in entropy, meaning it will decrease the sun's entropy when it leaves it) which turns into common heat high in entropy ONLY when it bounces off/gets absorbed by an atom or molecule?

 

can i say that light is more organized than heat, and that the sun deposits low entropy (or sucks high entropy) from earth by sending electromagnetic waves to it? which earth then turns into "chaotic" heat and saves and builds up the "organization" into life forms?

 

kinda reminds me of uranium refinement, you get impure uranium(sunlight) and you separate it into pure uranium(organization/life) and crap(heat). and every LOT of crap comes with every small bit of uranium..

 

 

 

Yes and no. Whenever you have a temperature difference, you can extract work by transferring the heat from the hot to the cold. If you have no temperature difference, then no matter how hot it is you can't extract work from it.

i think this's pure genius. certainly was one of those "enlightenment" moments.

 

but, what difference would there be whether the thermocouple was there or not, heat is flowing anyways, so where does the electric energy come from?

---

Merged post follows:

Consecutive posts merged

forufes,

 

The term entropy may be used in different contexts to describe in mathematical terms the degree of which natural changes proceed toward their natural completion.

ok, this suddenly comes across as a great answer.

and it makes perfect sense, but only for "completable" changes.

gas expanding, how do you measure how far it proceeded into completion?

 

This can be for instance, how much a football stadium seating fills up before the kickoff, or how fast the stadium clears after the game.

regardless of whether this's a natural change or not (closed system), but i'm really interested in seeing what it's entropy mathematical computation formula would look like.

 

and of course, before the game the stadium would be at max entropy when full, as that is its inevitable end, also it is a fixed one which doesn't allow many arrangements (all seats have to be full, while a half full stadium could be half filled in many ways and arrangements).

 

and after the game it would be at max entropy when empty.

 

is this scientific entropy?(apparently yes, albeit not a thermodynamic one).

 

so how can this kind of entropy never decrease in total?

---

Merged post follows:

Consecutive posts merged

3) after maxwell screwed up entropy for some time by showing how his scarce demon can reverse it, scientists after squeezing their brains for some decades recognized information as a form of energy the demon had to sacrifice as to exceed or equal the entropy he was decreasing, ~~and entropy had its mischievous way in the universe again.

 

now how the FUDGE can i account for information in my(or any) entropy analysis???

 

i'm having a real hard time combining the easy to understand general meaning of entropy, and its scientific calculable form.

Edited June 5, 2010 by forufes
Consecutive posts merged.

[michel123456]

Entropy seems to be the center of interest lately.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_as_an_entropic_force and all the links provided.

[pioneer]

I like to think of entropy in terms of degrees of freedom, since it makes it much easier to see subtle entropy attributes. For example, an expensive diamond may have a nearly perfect crystal lattice. The defects represent entropy, since they define degrees of freedom in the ordered lattice.

 

An entropy increase requires energy. The entropy defect in a diamond represents a higher energy state than the perfect crystal lattice. If we lower the entropy of the defect, to make the crystal perfect, energy will be given off.

 

The sun fuses hydrogen, lowering the degrees of freedom of the hydrogen since the original hydrogen becomes confined in a nucleus space instead of being able to move about as hydrogen. Gravity lowers entropy since a cloud of stella gas has more degrees of freedom; can be in more places in space and time.

 

The substructure of matter has less entropy when it becomes part of a composite structure, such as the proton. Once we separate the composite back into substructure, it now has the degree of freedom to go poof.

 

Forming the protons of the universe from sub-particles, drastically lowered entropy of the universe and released a lot of energy. After that phase change the substructure could not go poof, since it lost the energy needed for that degree of freedom. We can add the energy back using accelerator-colliders to restore that original degree of freedom.

 

Life both lowers and increases entropy; degrees of freedom, depending on what process is going on. When the cell metabolizes it makes small things from bigger things; Sugar to CO2 and H2O. More parts means more degrees of freedom.

 

When we duplicate the DNA, we need to lower the entropy or degrees of freedom of thousands of DNA monomers, so they line up as the DNA double helix. The proof reading enzymes lower the DNA entropy even further, by taking away any residual degrees of freedom (defects) in base pairs; needs to be exact. Then packing proteins further lower entropy by winding the DNA into chromosomes. Then the pendulum swings the other way, with the entropy of the DNA increasing, as the DNA divides into two.

 

AIDS is interesting, in that it lowers the entropy of the immune system. The immune system loses the freedom to do important tasks. That makes the rest of the body more subject to entropy. Death is entropy since it reduces an integrated system into small dissociated parts; decomposition.

 

The human ego, by giving us free choice and free will allows humans additional degrees of freedom, relative to animals. The higher entropy defined by human ego, which allows more degrees of freedom, needs a source of energy.