What is the second law of

thermodynamics?
Alok Jha Sun 1 Dec 2013 03.00 EST

Endless movement between hot and cold will eventually mean the end of the
universe

The second law of thermodynamics Photograph: Observer

Thermodynamics is the study of heat and energy. At its heart are laws that
describe how energy moves around within a system, whether an atom, a
hurricane or a black hole. The first law describes how energy cannot be
created or destroyed, merely transformed from one kind to another. The
second law, however, is probably better known and even more profound
because it describes the limits of what the universe can do. This law is about
inefficiency, degeneration and decay. It tells us all we do is inherently
wasteful and that there are irreversible processes in the universe. It gives us
an arrow for time and tells us that our universe has a inescapably bleak,
desolate fate.

Despite these somewhat deflating ideas, the ideas of thermodynamics were

formulated in a time of great technological optimism – the Industrial
Revolution. In the mid-19th century, physicists and engineers were building
steam engines to mechanise work and transport and were trying to work out
how to make them more powerful and efficient.

Many scientists and engineers – including Rudolf Clausius, James Joule and
Lord Kelvin – contributed to the development of thermodynamics, but the
father of the discipline was the French physicist Sadi Carnot. In 1824 he
published Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, which laid down the basic
principles, gleaned from observations of how energy moved around engines
and how wasted heat and useful work were related.

The second law can be expressed in several ways, the simplest being that heat
will naturally flow from a hotter to a colder body. At its heart is a property of
thermodynamic systems called entropy – in the equations above it is
represented by "S" – in loose terms, a measure of the amount of disorder
within a system. This can be represented in many ways, for example in the
arrangement of the molecules – water molecules in an ice cube are more
ordered than the same molecules after they have been heated into a gas.
Whereas the water molecules were in a well-defined lattice in the ice cube,
they float unpredictably in the gas. The entropy of the ice cube is, therefore,
lower than that of the gas. Similarly, the entropy of a plate is higher when it is
in pieces on the floor compared with when it is in one piece in the sink.

A more formal definition for entropy as heat moves around a system is given
in the first of the equations. The infinitesimal change in entropy of a system
(dS) is calculated by measuring how much heat has entered a closed system
(δQ) divided by the common temperature (T) at the point where the heat
transfer took place.

The second equation is a way to express the second law of thermodynamics in

terms of entropy. The formula says that the entropy of an isolated natural
system will always tend to stay the same or increase – in other words, the
energy in the universe is gradually moving towards disorder. Our original
statement of the second law emerges from this equation: heat cannot
spontaneously flow from a cold object (low entropy) to a hot object (high
entropy) in a closed system because it would violate the equation.
(Refrigerators seemingly break this rule since they can freeze things to much
lower temperatures than the air around them. But they don't violate the
second law because they are not isolated systems, requiring a continual input
of electrical energy to pump heat out of their interior. The fridge heats up the
room around it and, if unplugged, would naturally return to thermal
equilibrium with the room.)

This formula also imposes a direction on to time; whereas every other

physical law we know of would work the same whether time was going
forwards or backwards, this is not true for the second law of thermodynamics.
However long you leave it, a boiling pan of water is unlikely to ever become a
block of ice. A smashed plate could never reassemble itself, as this would
reduce the entropy of the system in defiance of the second law of
thermodynamics. Some processes, Carnot observed, are irreversible.

Carnot examined steam engines, which work by burning fuel to heat up a

cylinder containing steam, which expands and pushes on a piston to then do
something useful. The portion of the fuel's energy that is extracted and made
to do something useful is called work, while the remainder is the wasted (and
disordered) energy we call heat. Carnot showed that you could predict the
theoretical maximum efficiency of a steam engine by measuring the
difference in temperatures of the steam inside the cylinder and that of the air
around it, known in thermodynamic terms as the hot and cold reservoirs of a
system respectively.

Heat engines work because heat naturally flows from hot to cold places. If
there was no cold reservoir towards which it could move there would be no
heat flow and the engine would not work. Because the cold reservoir is always
above absolute zero, no heat engine can be 100% efficient.

The best-designed engines, therefore, heat up steam (or other gas) to the
highest possible temperature then release the exhaust at the lowest possible
temperature. The most modern steam engines can get to around 60%
efficiency and diesel engines in cars can get to around 50% efficient. Petrol-
based internal combustion engines are much more wasteful of their fuel's
energy.

The inefficiencies are built into any system using energy and can be described
thermodynamically. This wasted energy means that the overall disorder of
the universe – its entropy – will increase over time but at some point reach a
maximum. At this moment in some unimaginably distant future, the energy
in the universe will be evenly distributed and so, for all macroscopic
purposes, will be useless. Cosmologists call this the "heat death" of the
universe, an inevitable consequence of the unstoppable march of entropy.

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