The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy always increases, which means that if there was a point where there was heat inside a box, the heat would dissipate throughout the box. If we wanted to return all that heat to the original point, we would have to add energy to move the heat to its original point. Wouldn’t this mean that energy is lost when the heat dissipates?
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Entropy is the measure of energy in a system that isn’t useful anymore. All of the energy is still there, but in the high entropy state, that energy can’t be used to do work.
I like to use chocolate milk to explain entropy. You have the milk and the syrup (or powder) and if you kesve them unmixed, thats a low entropy state because it’s highly organized. If we stir up the chocolate milk, we still have the same stuff there, but it’s now all mixed up, and we can’t unmix it now. It’s in the high entropy state.
Imagine the chocolate being dissolved into the milk as the system doing work. Early on, we get lots of work out of the system, but once its all mixed in, we can’t do any more work because there’s no more chocolate and milk anymore, only chocolate milk.
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