#secondlawofthermodynamics

[alekhyasworld]

Second Law Of Thermodynamics - WBBSE Solutions

First And Second Law Of Thermodynamics The Secondary Of Thermodynamics The 2nd Law Of Thermodynamics Let us consider a man holding a glass o

secondlawofthermodynamics

[letteror]

How did life on Earth actually come about?, Addy Pross, 29/4/2014, “How chemistry becomes biology?”

* https://aeon.co/essays/paradoxes-of-stability-how-life-began-and-why-it-can-t-rest 

“We know where we are with inanimate matter. Ever since Isaac Newton, it has answered to a basically mechanical view of nature, blindly following its laws without regard for purposes.

Living things might be made of the same fundamental stuff as the rest of the material world – ‘dead’ atoms and molecules – but they do not behave in the same way at all. 

As any biologist will acknowledge, function and purpose remain central themes in the life sciences, though they have long been banished from the physical sciences.

One of the leading evolutionary biologists of the 20th century, Ernst Mayr, openly argued for the ‘autonomy of biology’. Physics and chemistry deal with inanimate matter, he insisted, biology deals with living systems, and, at least for the time being, that’s that.

This has meant fencing off biology from physics and chemistry, and developing a separate philosophy of science. 

But this is not good enough. The purpose-driven character of life stands as a challenge to our understanding of the material nature of the universe. 

How, then, can living things be reconciled with our mechanical-mechanistic universe? 

This is a conceptual question, of course, but it has a historical dimension: how did life on Earth actually come about? How could it have? Both at the abstract level and in the particular story of our world, there seems to be a chasm between the animate and inanimate realms.

I am a theoretical chemist drawn to a new field, systems chemistry. That means I’m interested in replicating molecules and the reaction networks they establish. Some recent research in this field appears to show us just how biology can be restored to the mechanical world. 

The name we give to the process by which simple life emerged from inanimate matter is ‘abiogenesis’. Evolution, on the other hand, is the biological mechanism by which life branched out into Darwin’s ‘endless forms most beautiful’.  #Abiogenesis

Traditionally, these are viewed as quite different things: the former [#abiogenesis], one of nature’s greatest mysteries; the latter [#evolution], broadly understood, thanks to Darwin. Through systems chemistry, however, they stand revealed as a single continuous progression.

We know that a mechanism akin to Darwinian evolution operates, in the first place, on nonliving matter – even on single molecules. Feed a population of RNA molecules the appropriate chemical building blocks and, under the right conditions, they will start to self-replicate. 

#RNA is not living material in any meaningful sense, yet it is subject to evolution. Thus we find our first bridge between living and dead matter.  

Thus the purpose-driven character of life, the very thing that seemed to distinguish biology from the rest of nature, turns out not to be unique to life after all. Its beginnings are already discernible in certain inanimate systems, provided they are replicative and able to evolve. And this driving force can be described in strictly physical terms. 

Here’s a little truism for you. Unchanging things don’t change, and changing things do change – until they change into things that don’t. That statement is, of course, true as a matter of logic: as true as ‘one plus one equals two’. 

Things tend towards persistent forms because stability is the end of the road for all things – perhaps even the Universe as a whole. We talk a lot about stability both in science and in everyday life. It means pretty much the same thing in either context:

long-lasting, persistent, unchanging over time. And true to the prediction of our little logical truism above, there is indeed a law of physics and chemistry that says that things, in general, become more stable over time. I’m talking about the #SecondLawofThermodynamics, one of the most famous laws in all of science. 

The Second Law [#entropy] explains the direction of change and why certain things remain unchanged over time. That explanation can be given in terms of energy. 

High energy is associated with instability. Low energy is associated with stability, and when a physical system reaches its lowest energy state (equilibrium), no further change takes place. 

What is entropy? Simply put, it is a measure of the orderliness of a physical system. States of low entropy are ‘highly ordered’ in something very like the everyday sense of the phrase. Picture a tidy desk, papers neatly stacked, pens in the pot. As order decreases and the desk gets messier, entropy increases.

After all, the messy states outnumber the tidy ones. The weight of numbers is on the side of messiness. What’s more, any random change to the arrangement is likely to make it even messier. Now, random changes, in the form of bumps and jiggles, happen constantly. So things get more stable (and messier) over time. As the Universe undergoes change, entropy increases.

Living things are low-entropy and energy-consuming, so they are unstable in the thermodynamic sense. 

Self-replicating molecular systems can, in the right circumstances, start off on the same explosive path. But there’s a twist: when they do, a new kind of chemistry emerges. Ultimately, it is this new chemistry that leads to what we term biology.

How could such a transformation come about? Why do replicating molecules give rise to replicating cells? In a word: evolution. Or, in four more: replication, variation, competition, selection.

There are, however, two big differences. The first is this. In the replicative world, stability can be unrelated to energy content. The second difference is a little harder to grasp. With entropy, the weight of numbers is always in the same direction. That keeps things simple: everything tends towards randomness and disorder.  Some replicators are indeed astonishingly durable, but, crucially, #DKS always remains circumstantial. Change the environmental conditions and the winner of the replicative race can change.

In fact, that’s exactly what makes life so capricious and the evolutionary path largely unpredictable: the mathematics of replication forces it into a paradoxically restless search for rest.

Finally the secret of nature’s two material facets – animate and inanimate – is coming into focus. Animate and inanimate forms came about because there are two mathematical engines of stability. 

Of course, once we recognise the existence of two distinct stability kinds, one based on probabilities and energy, the other on exponentially driven self-replication, the reason for the teleological character of all living things becomes obvious. 

Nature’s most fundamental drive, dictated by logic itself, is toward greater stability. That drive has a thermodynamic manifestation, as expressed through the ubiquitous Second Law, but it also has a kinetic manifestation – the drive toward increasingly persistent replicators.”

[aaronhillsworld]

#secondlawofthermodynamics https://www.instagram.com/p/B-TEwAlFidj/?igshid=tnq346agpluk

[tajagnayouthclub-blog]

Why We Can't Invent a Perfect Engine

it’s time to move on to the second law and how we came to understand it. We’ll explain the differences between the first and second law, and we’ll talk about the Carnot cycle and why we can never design a perfectly efficient engine. Read the full article

[tajagnayouthclub-blog]

Reversibility & Irreversibility

How do we design the most efficient machines and processes? Today we’ll try to figure that out as we discuss heat & work, reversibility & irreversibility, and how to use efficiency to measure a system. Read the full article

[plantrue]

#Entropy also increases in the world with Supergirls. 슈퍼걸들이 날아다니는 세계에서도 엔트로피는 증가한다. #무질서도 #열역학제2법칙 #disorder #SecondLawOfThermodynamics 그래도 이 집구석이 그리웠던 일주일. #sistergram 👭(한보라마을 9단지에서)

[blissfulillee-blog]

Captain of Entropy. Agent of Chaos. #leonardcatnip #catsandchaos #secondlawofthermodynamics

[blissfulillee-blog]

Captain of Entropy. Agent of Chaos. #leonardcatnip #catsandchaos #secondlawofthermodynamics