Recent content by Andrew_

Well any book on classical thermodynamics would do. A recent book I read is "Principles of thermodynamics" , By Myron Kaufman. I quote from the book page 75 , the 2nd law of thermodynamics , the last paragraph , "Inorder to usefully apply the 2nd law, it will be necessary to be able to...

Atkins' pchem is a general book , so you will never really learn thermodynamics , kinetics , or quantum mechanics from that book. You will simply have an idea about each field , nothing more. The book serves as a good reference for me , but I would never recommend it to any undergraduate who...

How could this possibly be ? Every single classical thermodynamics book divides the universe into a system and its surroundings. The entropy of the system is a state function while that of the surroundings is not. It follows then that the entropy of the universe is a path function. For any...

Perhaps because it seems almost everyone is using a classical thermodynamic approach. But classical thermodynamics is not truly thermodynamics , it's simply thermostatics. You raise an interesting point here. How could one define non-equilibrium entropy based on the equilibrium temperature ...

Please note that in generalized thermodynamics , the author introduces something called "calortropy" , which is the usual entropy but for irreversible processes. He writes , for example, the clausius inequality d \Psi \geq 0 for isolated systems , where psi = calortropy. Why he chooses a...

Andy Resnick, it would be interesting if you provide a rational thermodynamics perpsective because I am myself still new to this field. Andrew Mason, I agree with you. What you posted is well known , nothing controversial there, but how would you explain the fact that the entropy of the...

If we consider an isolated system in which a process occurs, then according to the clausius inequality : dS \geq \frac{dQ}{T} Since dQ = 0 , it follows that if the process occurs reversibly dS = 0 and irreversibly dS > 0. But entropy is a state function , how could this possibly be ...

atyy thanks a lot for the links , lots of useful stuff there ... I'm still reading them. However, I do not follow when you say that the ideal gas does not obey the 3rd law. Isn't the 3rd law fundamental ? That is , all systems - real or deal - should obey that law no matter what. And what do...

Thanks for the encouragement. I got my equations directly from the book. I'll write the the derivation below but for a system composed of distinguishable atoms. There's no real difference except the N! added to the partition function in the latter case , which should not make any difference at T...

Hello muppet , thanks for replying. Honestly I do not fully understand the 3rd law , so yes I might be confusing this. However, as I understand, at T = 0 all the atoms are at the ground state , so W = 1. Then S = 0 at T = 0. This should be true for any system , correct ? Why then is it not...

Hello, I'm still trying getting familiar with the concepts of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics , and there's this equation for S of an ideal system, which somehow perplexes me. Suppose the ideal gas is composed of N indistinguishable atoms , then : S = \frac{U - U_{0} }{T} + k Ln...