- #1
KooCmstr
- 12
- 0
Okay, I'm not an idiot, but can someone explain to me (in common layman's terms) what entropy is? And it's relation to life?
KooCmstr said:Okay, I'm not an idiot, but can someone explain to me (in common layman's terms) what entropy is? And it's relation to life?
For over a century and a half, beginning with Clausius' 1863 memoir "On the Concentration of Rays of Heat and Light, and on the Limits of its Action", much writing and research has been devoted to the relationship between thermodynamic entropy and the evolution of life. The argument that life feeds on negative entropy or negentropy as put forth in the 1944 book What is Life? by physicist Erwin Schrödinger served as a further stimulus to this research. Recent writings[citation needed] have utilized the concept of Gibbs free energy to elaborate on this issue. Tangentially, some creationists have argued that entropy rules out evolution.[45]
In the popular 1982 textbook Principles of Biochemistry by noted American biochemist Albert Lehninger, for example, it is argued that the order produced within cells as they grow and divide is more than compensated for by the disorder they create in their surroundings in the course of growth and division. In short, according to Lehninger, "living organisms preserve their internal order by taking from their surroundings free energy, in the form of nutrients or sunlight, and returning to their surroundings an equal amount of energy as heat and entropy."[46]
Evolution related definitions:
* Negentropy - a shorthand colloquial phrase for negative entropy.[47]
* Ectropy - a measure of the tendency of a dynamical system to do useful work and grow more organized.[30]
* Syntropy - a tendency towards order and symmetrical combinations and designs of ever more advantageous and orderly patterns.
* Extropy – a metaphorical term defining the extent of a living or organizational system's intelligence, functional order, vitality, energy, life, experience, and capacity and drive for improvement and growth.
* Ecological entropy - a measure of biodiversity in the study of biological ecology
KooCmstr said:Still confused. Are there more layier laymens terms we can use?
There are many ways of stating the second law of thermodynamics, but all are equivalent in the sense that each form of the second law logically implies every other form (Fermi, 1936). Thus, the theorems of thermodynamics can be proved using any form of the second law and third law
The formulation of the second law that refers to entropy directly is due to Rudolf Clausius:
In an isolated system, a process can occur only if it increases the total entropy of the system.
Thus, the system can either stay the same, or undergo some physical process that increases entropy. (An exception to this rule is a reversible or "isentropic" process, such as frictionless adiabatic compression.) Processes that decrease total entropy of an isolated system do not occur. If a system is at equilibrium, by definition no spontaneous processes occur, and therefore the system is at maximum entropy.
Also due to Clausius is the simplest formulation of the second law, the heat formulation:
Heat cannot spontaneously flow from a material at lower temperature to a material at higher temperature.
Informally, "Heat doesn't flow from cold to hot (without work input)", which is obviously true from everyday experience. For example in a refrigerator, heat flows from cold to hot, but only when aided by an external agent, i.e. the compressor. Note that from the mathematical definition of entropy, a process in which heat flows from cold to hot has decreasing entropy. This is allowable in a non-isolated system, however only if entropy is created elsewhere, such that the total entropy is constant or increasing, as required by the second law. For example, the electrical energy going into a refrigerator is converted to heat and goes out the back, representing a net increase in entropy.
A third formulation of the second law, the heat engine formulation, by Lord Kelvin, is:
It is impossible to convert heat completely into work.
That is, it is impossible to extract energy by heat from a high-temperature energy source and then convert all of the energy into work. At least some of the energy must be passed on to heat a low-temperature energy sink. Thus, a heat engine with 100% efficiency is thermodynamically impossible.
KooCmstr said:So life is in a sense, simply highly organized molecules that happen to create energy in order to sustain said organization? Like a perfect storm or something?
Please, credit where credit is due. Brian Greene is a brilliant, brilliant writer.Schrodinger's Dog said:Nice analogy DaveC.
DaveC426913 said:Please, credit where credit is due. Brian Greene is a brilliant, brilliant writer.
KooCmstr said:Still confused. Are there more layier laymens terms we can use?
The trouble is, that's an ambiguous and rather vague definition. Suggesting it is synonymous with 'confused' is unhelpful.oldman said:Entropy is another word for confusion--- but with a quantitative slant.
So in fact you do already understand it; you could say that your state of mind when you are confused is one with high entropy! Entropy is an abstract descriptive term invented by physicists long ago to measure how confused simple systems can get.
Entropy is a measure of the disorder or randomness in a system. In terms of life, it refers to the tendency of a system to move towards a state of disorder, or a decrease in usable energy. This is important in understanding life because all living organisms require energy to sustain their complex structures and functions, and the concept of entropy helps us understand how living systems maintain order and complexity despite the natural tendency towards disorder.
The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of a closed system will always increase over time. This means that the universe as a whole is constantly moving towards a state of maximum disorder. In terms of life, this means that living organisms must constantly take in energy and create order in order to survive and maintain their complexity, otherwise they will eventually succumb to the natural increase in entropy.
While the overall entropy of the universe will always increase, living systems are able to temporarily decrease entropy within their own boundaries by taking in energy and creating order. However, this process requires a constant input of energy and cannot be sustained indefinitely.
Evolution can be seen as a way for living organisms to adapt and maintain order in the face of increasing entropy. Through natural selection, organisms are able to continually evolve and become more complex, thus delaying the effects of entropy on their systems.
No, entropy and chaos are not the same thing. While both refer to a state of disorder, chaos is more unpredictable and random, while entropy is a measure of the amount of disorder in a system. In living systems, entropy can actually lead to increased order and complexity as organisms adapt and evolve, rather than chaos.