![]() Potential energy of the basketball is converted to kinetic energy, Might spontaneously roll off a table, bounce a couple of times,Īnd come to rest on the floor. Of heat drives many processes in our daily lives. ( Δ Ssur ) is caused by dissipation of heat. The change in entropy of the surroundings Universe increases during each of these spontaneous processes: You can reverse them only by coupling them to some other process that increase entropy. These processes go in one direction only. A few spontaneous processes are a falling brick, a bouncing ball, a crashing car, a melting ice cube on a warm day, freezing water on a cold day, or the chemical transformations of a burning match. ![]() By involking the universe, we are saying that we are accounting for all of the entropy change assocated with that process. So we say a process is spontaneous if it increases the entropy of the universe. ![]() A process is spontaneous only if it causes a net increase in entropy. But there is an important accounting issue: entropy can increase in one place somewhere and decrease in another. All toys and clothes must be in their properĪ process can be driven, or forced to happen, only by increasing entropy. A neat room has low entropy because there are few ways to be neat. Toys and clothes can be laying around anywhere within the room. A messy room has high entropy because there are many possibly ways to be messy. There are many analogies to these phenomena in our everyday lives. Increasing the volume of a gas will increase its entropy. For a gas, increasing the volume will increase the number of accessible states. So heating a system will increase its entropy. Adding heat increasees the number of accessible molecular rotational, translational and vibrational states. ![]() A low entropy system has few accessible states. A high entropy system has many accessible states. What is a Spontaneous Process?Įntropy is a measure of possibilities. ![]()
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