I don’t get what free energy is and how change in entropy affects it
In: Chemistry
Free energy is the energy that can be used to _perform work_. Increase of entropy lowers the free energy of a system.
So imagine, that you sit in a room, that is completely isolated from outside world. You have some amount of red-hot iron and a bucket of cold water. You can now use the heat to produce steam and power a turbine (perform work). After the temperature of everything in you room evens out, you can no longer power the turbine, but the total energy of the system is the same. So the free energy went down and the entropy went up.
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