- #1
Mr_Bojingles
- 79
- 0
I decided to try and learn what entropy is today and I swear to god I've been sitting here for 4 hours and I still don't have the foggiest idea of what the hell is it? Its driving me insane. I can't think anymore because of the stress that's building up from the fact that I just can't comprehend the concept.
What I've read is that its ties into the second law of thermodynamics and that basically it is the measure of the forces that tend to disperse molecules or heat and distribute is uniformly in a closed system. That makes perfect sense to me.
Heres where the contradictions start. Other sites say that entropy is the measure of disorder and that nature tends to go towards an unorganized, disordered state. Personally I see the dispersion of matter or energy to achieve a uniform state as organized and ordered. Theres nothing disorganized about that.
What am I missing here? I can't make any sense of the explanations on the internet. Some of them say if you have 2 metal blocks and one is hotter than the other. Let's say block 1 is hot and block 2 is cold. They say that if heat transfers from block one to block 2 that the entropy of block 1 rises while the entropy of block 2 decreases. If that's the case I have no idea what entropy is.
I'll be too pissed off to go to bed unless I understand the concept and the way things are looking I'm not going to be sleeping tonight. Can anyone help me understand the concept? If I can just figure out what entropy is I might be calm enough to go to sleep. I'll leave enthalpy for another day.
What I've read is that its ties into the second law of thermodynamics and that basically it is the measure of the forces that tend to disperse molecules or heat and distribute is uniformly in a closed system. That makes perfect sense to me.
Heres where the contradictions start. Other sites say that entropy is the measure of disorder and that nature tends to go towards an unorganized, disordered state. Personally I see the dispersion of matter or energy to achieve a uniform state as organized and ordered. Theres nothing disorganized about that.
What am I missing here? I can't make any sense of the explanations on the internet. Some of them say if you have 2 metal blocks and one is hotter than the other. Let's say block 1 is hot and block 2 is cold. They say that if heat transfers from block one to block 2 that the entropy of block 1 rises while the entropy of block 2 decreases. If that's the case I have no idea what entropy is.
I'll be too pissed off to go to bed unless I understand the concept and the way things are looking I'm not going to be sleeping tonight. Can anyone help me understand the concept? If I can just figure out what entropy is I might be calm enough to go to sleep. I'll leave enthalpy for another day.
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