Originally Posted by
kev67
Entropy is a pretty tricky subject. Temperature v Entropy graphs are used to represent thermodynamic cycles of steam pistons and turbines. The entropy of steam is greater than the entropy of water. The thing that gets me is that entropy represents disorder yet it can be measured?! or at least calculated. In metric, its units are kJ/kg.K, i.e. work divided by mass and temperature.
The concept of entropy is also used in digital communications compression techniques. More data bits are allocated the more unique a piece of information is. Very few data bits are allocated to very common pieces of information. In a picture, a patch of blue sky does not contain a lot of information, so would be compressed into few bits of data.
I read A Brief History of Time once, in which Stephen Hawking wrote that total entropy increases as time progresses. Highly ordered states tend to break down into lower ordered states. If you drop a glass it breaks into pieces. You can make another glass, but that uses more energy. The net result after making the glass is greater entropy because the fuel you used to make the glass has turned into CO2, and the chemical energy was turned to heat. The CO2 may eventually be turned back into wood via photosynthesis, but this process requires light energy from the sun. After billions and billions of years, all available energy in the universe is turned into heat energy. Heat can be still be converted into work, but only where a heat difference occurs. The larger the heat difference, the more efficient a heat engine is and the more work it can do. However heat flows from hot objects to cold objects until all are the same temperature. The heat death of the universe will occur when everything in the universe is the same temperature. The odd thing about the Big Bang according to Hawking (iirc), was that the conditions of the Big Bang represent very high entropy. Everything was mixed up and very hot. Somehow things went from very high entropy to very low entropy.