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Chapter 21 - ENTROPY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2013

Steven C. Frautschi ,
Richard P. Olenick ,
Tom M. Apostol  and
David L. Goodstein
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Summary

For the present I will limit myself to quoting the following result: if we imagine the same quantity, which in the case of a single body I have called its entropy, formed in a consistent manner for the whole universe (taking into account all the conditions), and if at the same time we use the other notion, energy, with its simpler meaning, we can formulate the fundamental laws of the universe corresponding to the laws of the mechanical theory of heat in the following simple form:

1. The energy of the universe is constant.

2. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.

Rudolph Clausius in Annalen der Physik, 125 (1865)

TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF ENTROPY

In this chapter we turn our attention to the entropy principle, a concept which, like Newton's second law, is an organizing principle for understanding the world. The principle is relatively simple to state, but understanding its meaning is more challenging.

Through theoretical studies of Carnot's work in 1865, the German physicist Rudolph Clausius introduced a new physical quantity closely linked to energy. He called it entropy, a word which sounds like “energy” and comes from the Greek word for “transformation.” The use of entropy provides a way to analyze the behavior of energy in transformation.

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The Mechanical Universe
Mechanics and Heat, Advanced Edition
 , pp. 531 - 546
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1986

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