Laws of thermodynamics

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The laws of thermodynamics are a grand-sounding term often bandied around in discussions of science, pseudoscience, and general woo. Despite being scientific laws themselves, they are often cited by pseudoscientists (e.g., creationists) as a reason for why some other bit of science must be wrong. The classic example of this is "evolution must be wrong as it violates the laws of thermodynamics". As well as being ironic, such claims are usually also bullshit.

Thermodynamics as a subject originated in the Industrial Revolution, more or less as a way for engineers to understand how steam engines worked, and how to make them more efficient. Since then, it has developed and generalised into a rigorous mathematical treatment of energy and entropy, and is a bread-and-butter part of science courses such as physics and chemistry.

There are three 'Laws' of thermodynamics ("laws" in the sense that they describe how physical systems "must" behave), and also a "zeroth" law, which isn't really a law so much as a definition of what is meant by "temperature".

• Zeroth law of thermodynamics: "…if two bodies are each in thermal equilibrium with a third body, they must also be in equilibrium with each other."
• First law of thermodynamics: "Within an isolated system, the total energy of the system is constant, even if energy has been converted from one form to another."
• Second law of thermodynamics: The entropy of an isolated system does not decrease.
• Third law of thermodynamics: The entropy of an isolated system approaches a constant value as the temperature of the system approaches absolute zero.

The 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd Laws may be humorously summarized in non-scientific form as:

1. You can't get something for nothing.
2. You can't even break even unless you cool the temperature to absolute zero.
3. It's impossible to actually reach absolute zero.

Or, if you are a poker player or someone who likes to visit casinos:

1. You can't win.
2. You can't break even.
3. You can't get out of the game.

The zeroth law

The zeroth law of thermodynamics states that if two systems are in thermal equilibrium with a reservoir, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other. It means that thermal equilibrium is a transitive relation. It's not possible to have three systems, A, B, and C, where A is in equilibrium with B and B in equilibrium with C, but A is not in equilibrium with C. If this was possible, periodically connecting the systems A and C through a heat engine would create a perpetual motion machine.

The zeroth law is kind of a no-brainer, and was obviously known before the first, second, and third laws of thermodynamics were described. The need to formulate it as a formal law arose after the other laws had been established, so it was named the zeroth law in a backronym-ish manner. In fact, it's arguably not really a "law" at all, but more just a definition of what is meant by "temperature".

The first law

The first law of thermodynamics states that the total energy of the universe is constant. It is an expression of the law of conservation of energy; energy cannot be created or destroyed, only change form, as with matter becoming energy or vice versa. To put it simply, you can't create energy or matter, just change its arrangement. And as with all the other laws of thermodynamics, it only applies to a closed system.

Relation to religion

This law is often brought up by Christian apologists when trying to disprove the Big Bang theory, usually in the argument from first cause form. They choose to ignore two key facts, however:

• The Big Bang theory doesn't necessarily mean that the universe came from nothing
• The first law also renders any creation event impossible, because it is, by definition, creating something from nothing.

When this is brought up, apologists usually either get angry, or start dodging the question by trying to explain how God is beyond the laws of physics.

Relation to perpetual motion

See the main article on this topic: Perpetual motion

The first law of thermodynamics, together with the second law, is the main reason why perpetual motion doesn't work. Since the machine can't create any new energy of its own, and the second law degrades what energy it has, the machine will eventually stop functioning. Proponents of perpetual motion often will come up with a rather wide variety of reasons as to why this isn't the case, ranging from magnets to "time crystals".

Relation to woo

Unsurprisingly, the first law also renders a huge list of New Age ideas impossible. These include, but are not limited to:

• energy woo
• Ghosts
• Magic
• Psychic powers
• Telekinesis

The second law

“”Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes, and the second law of thermodynamics.

—Seth Lloyd

The second law of thermodynamics states that "the entropy of an isolated system does not decrease". This is often taken to mean that "disorder always increases" and is frequently misinterpreted. Another way of putting it is "an isolated system's ability to do work decreases over time". The second law provides the thermodynamic arrow of time in that one can tell the difference between the past and the future by looking at the amount of entropy in the closed system.

Explanation of terms

Thermodynamic systems

• Open system — Exchanges both matter and energy with its surroundings
• Closed system — Exchanges energy, but not matter, with its surroundings
• Isolated system — Exchanges neither energy nor matter with its surroundings

The Universe is an isolated system since it is a term to describe the entire spacetime continuum, including all of the energy stored in it. In reality, the Universe is regarded as the only true isolated system, as perfect isolation on a smaller scale is impossible. The Earth can be viewed as an approximately closed system, although it is open in reality.

While it may be possible that the universe isn't truly an isolated system (as in some forms of multiverse speculation or M-theory), there is no known way to test this, and so it can be considered an isolated system for all intents and purposes. Should that not be the case, however, it would undoubtedly have a significant effect on the ultimate fate of the universe.

Entropy

Strictly speaking, entropy is the logarithm of the multiplicity of states, or the degree of dispersion of energy in a system. It is expressed by the equation $S=k_{B}\ln \Omega$, where S is entropy, k_B is Boltzmann's constant and Ω is the multiplicity of the states.

A more commonly given definition of entropy is "degree of disorder in the system", and hence the Second Law of Thermodynamics is often explained as "systems become increasingly disordered". From the definition above, this is equivalent to saying that a system will tend to transition from less probable to more probable sets of states.

Actually, entropy is a little more abstract and the second law of thermodynamics implies that the Universe will always become increasingly uniform; that is, heat (transfer of energy in a way other than work) will spread until the entire universe has the same temperature and energy level (between systems in thermal contact, heat always transfers from the system at a higher temperature to the one at a lower temperature until balance is achieved), and forces will continue to work until a universal balance has been achieved.

In other words, everything in an isolated system is seen to work towards attaining a state of equilibrium or balance. Once universal equilibrium is attained, there will be no basis for any work to be sustained or to occur; ergo, the forces in an isolated system will become sedentary and no work will be done.

The simple physical analogy commonly given is that given a period of time, a room will become more disordered (stuff gets distributed evenly throughout the room instead of being concentrated in a neat stack) as long as a person lives in it but makes no effort to clean it out. In the physical world, all forms of energy are converted to thermal energy, and become more uniformly distributed among the Universe, until the universe becomes energetically uniform. In its final state, the Universe will become one uniform space where no work can be done, since energy cannot be "concentrated" by doing work. This state is called maximum entropy. When the universe has reached maximum entropy, it is said to be completely "disordered", as there are no ordered patterns left and there is no way to ascertain information about the history of the universe.

In actuality, as opposed to being in a state of complete disorder upon achieving maximum entropy, the Universe has instead homogenized and become more uniform. In very simple terms, maximum entropy ≠ disorder, get it? It is on a basis similar to this that scientific educators have recognized that the disorder terminology, while simple and easy to comprehend, is an oversimplification at best, and a misleading false analogy at worst. As a result, science educators have largely phased out "disorder" terminology; most chemistry textbooks, for example, have removed (or at least heavily edited out) the disorder terminology. Of utmost importance, entropy is an energetic phenomenon, and only tangentially has to do with the distribution of matter in a system. (Statistically speaking, the molecules of a gas are unlikely to move to one side of a container without work being done on the gas. But doing work on the gas would increase the entropy of the universe, as the plunger, or whatever does the compression, would have to increase its entropy.)

The Second Law is a law of statistical mechanics, rather than a fundamental law of nature. Accordingly, violating it is not entirely impossible; however, its violation is extremely unlikely. But because its violation is not impossible, only extremely unlikely, it turns out that over extremely long timeframes, a violation may eventually occur. For example, a classical system which exhibits the second law of thermodynamics over reasonable timespans may nonetheless violate the law over times on the order of its Poincaré recurrence time — when Poincaré recurrence occurs, the entropy of the system will decrease to its original value. However, given the Poincaré recurrence time is going to be greatly longer than the age of the Universe so far, this is a purely theoretical consideration. Additionally, given any instance in which a macrostate decreases in entropy, there will be an astronomically large number of other instances of the same macrostate increasing in entropy. Also, the Second Law applies to large-scale systems; given two molecules, it is unlikely for the one with lower vibrational energy to impart some of its energy to one with higher, but unlike with large-scale systems, it remains a sizable possibility, and given the large number of molecules, it is guaranteed to happen occasionally.

Misapplication by creationists

The false analogy of entropy as disorder is used in a number of fields outside of science with varying success. Creationists have picked up on disorder terminology like a drowning man to a rope and attempted to apply the second law of thermodynamics as a refutation of evolution. The analogy would state that more complex life forms could never evolve from simpler ones.

It seems obvious that this false analogy of a false analogy is incorrect. First, the Earth is not an isolated system — it receives a copious amount of incoming energy from the Sun. Living organisms may be considered as open systems as well, since they exchange both matter and energy with their surroundings. Also, the Second Law doesn't say that order can never increase, (if that were true, "ice would never form and vapor would never condense, since both of those processes involve a decrease of entropy") but that the net amount of order of the system decreases. "Creation of ordered structures or live species always dissipate useful energy and generate entropy, without exception, and thus without Second Law violation". In other words, the amount of order that was produced on Earth ends up being much less compared to the amount of disorder produced in the universe as a whole. As Stephen Hawking points out:

The progress of the human race in understanding the universe has established a small corner of order in an increasingly disordered universe. If you remember every word in this book, your memory will have recorded about two million pieces of information: the order in your brain will have increased by about two million units. However, while you have been reading the book, you will have converted at least a thousand calories of ordered energy, in the form of food, into disordered energy, in the form of heat that you lose to the air around you by convection and sweat. This will increase the disorder of the universe by about twenty million million million million units – or about ten million million million times the increase in order in your brain – and that’s if you remember everything in this book.

Second, evolution does not imply that life is becoming increasingly complex; it only says that natural selection allows genes to be passed on differentially, such that life forms' characteristics change over time in response to their environment.

It also is a corruption to believe life is always "more ordered" than inanimate objects. In fact, life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics in strict energetic sense. The energy of the sun is converted into chemical potential energy, which is converted to mechanical work or heat (since, again, the Earth is not an isolated system). In each case, the energy transfer is inefficient, and some energy is dissipated as heat to the environment, leading to a dispersion of energy. In the same way, "ordered" snowflakes can form when the weather becomes cold but the entropy of the universe still increases.

Victor J. Stenger, a theoretical physicist, refuted this creationist claim:

However, a transmitter and a receiver are two interacting systems. They are not individually isolated. So, the entropy lost by one system can be gained by the other. Or, equivalently, the information lost by one can be gained by the other. So a physical system, such as a biological organism or Earth itself, which gets energy from the sun, can become more ordered by purely natural processes.

A quote in reference to chemistry education illustrates this point:

One aspect of biological systems that intrigues students is the possibility of discovering violations of the well-known laws of thermodynamics and physical chemistry. It is easy to refute most of the examples suggested. A germinating seed or an embryo developing in a fertilized chicken egg are often naively cited as examples of isolated systems in which an increase in order, or decrease in entropy occurs spontaneously. It is evident, however, that respiration, assuming O₂ is present, produces an increase in entropy in the form of heat, which more than compensates for the decrease in entropy that arises when the elements present in the seed or in the yolk of the egg are organized into tissues of the plant or animal. Indeed, neither germination nor embryonic development will occur in the absence of oxygen in the system in question.

Robert N. Oerter calculated that evolution would violate the second law if "the entire biomass is somehow converted from a highly disorganized state (say, a gas at 10,000 K) to a highly organized state (say, absolute zero) in about a month or less". Since evolution can take over MILLIONS of years, then it doesn't violate it.

In reference to evolution, PZ Myers put it: "The second law of thermodynamics argument is one of the hoariest, silliest claims in the creationist collection. It's self-refuting. Point to the creationist: ask whether he was a baby once. Has he grown? Has he become larger and more complex? Isn't he standing there in violation of the second law himself? Demand that he immediately regress to a slimy puddle of mingled menses and semen."

Furthermore, Carl Sagan pointed out that if the second law of thermodynamics were applied to a god, then god would necessarily have to die.

(Brief quiz about thermodynamics: How many generally recognized laws of thermodynamics are there? We know about the second law: Give the numbers for the other laws.)

Let us suppose that there actually were some process in nature which violated the second law of thermodynamics. Is that any reason to suppose that intelligent designers are responsible? The only intelligent designers that we have direct familiarity with, humans and other more or less intelligent animals, are as much subject to the second law of thermodynamics as are non-intelligent agents. Indeed, the laws of thermodynamics were discovered as limitations on what the clever engineers of the 19^th century were able to design. Intelligent designers are not able to construct perpetual motion machines. Intelligent designers don't bypass the second law of thermodynamics.

(See also, The Simpsons: "Lisa! In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!")

Some young Earth creationists have invoked "hydrodynamic sorting" in Noah's flood to account for the organization of the fossil record. Thereby, they implicitly acknowledge that an undirected mechanical process is capable of producing order from disorder, and contradict their naive version of the second law of thermodynamics.

Misapplication by flat earthers

Flat earthers (which often are creationist) claim that Earth's atmosphere “violates” the second law of thermodynamics since pressured gases can't exist next to a vacuum and therefore need to be contained by some "dome". Of course, this is stupid since Earth's atmosphere is being held by gravity, which pulls the air back down and causes an atmospheric pressure gradient. However, flat earthers reject the existence of gravity as well, which is even stupider.

Can entropy be reversed?

INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER

But seriously, as we mentioned further up, it is technically possible for entropy to spontaneously decrease, since it's a statistical law and not an unbreakable law of nature. Such reversals are expected to occur mostly on small scales and will be rare enough not to happen for a timespan of at least several hundred thousand times the current age of the universe...but eternity is a hell of a long time, and when the universe reaches a sufficiently low energy state for quantum effects to have an effect at a large-scale level, a single quantum fluctuation might be enough to start a new Big Bang (in approximately 10^10^56 years, which is a hell lot of time).

Sources

• Physics for Scientists & Engineers (6th edition) Raymond A. Serway & John W. Jewett, Jr.

See also

• Maxwell's Demon and Boltzmann brain — Thought experiments designed around the possibility of violation of the second law.

External Links

• Thermal Energy Article and Calculator
• The Second Law of Thermodynamics by Frank L. Lambert, Professor Emeritus of Occidental College
• Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law Of Thermodynamics (The Onion)
• MC Hawking — Entropy
• Does the Second Law of Thermodynamics Prove God? - Dr Sean Carroll
• Why Evolution Does Not Contradict The Second Law Of Thermodynamics (The Atheist Experience #600 with Russell Glasser and Jeff Dee).
• Creation Today Claims - Second Law of Thermodynamics - Paulogia
• How Creationism Taught Me Real Science 27 2nd Law of Thermodynamics - Tony Reed
• Does the origin of life contravene the second law of thermodynamics? (Paul Davies in Unbelievable?)