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Old 10-07-2007, 02:13 PM
soon2bepro soon2bepro is offline
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Default Understanding the second law of thermodynamics

I've read a bit about the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

As I understand it, no process can happen if it's not increasing the overall entropy of a system, therefore the universe is always going towards more entropy. And as I understand that, in a system with total entropy, there's no time.

Now my question is, is this change towards entropy slowing, accelerating, or neither? Put another way, does the 2nd law imply that the universe will at a certain point reach total entropy, or could it be the case that even though it has more entropy as time progresses, it can never reach a state of total entropy since this change is being slowed by orders of magnitude?

A second question - if we can choose what process to let happen (say use an engine vs using horsepower, etc), does that mean we get to choose to some extent the speed at which the entropy of a system progresses to?

And a third, related one: If a system has an X "level" of entropy, does that mean that in average, all processes will yield Y progress in entropy? In other words, given a set amount of entropy, is the average speed at which processes produce entropy fixed, or can it vary?



Thanks a lot for taking the time to read (and hopefully answer!) these questions. If you want to add any additional information that you consider relevant, I'll be grateful for that aswell
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