3 ms·
Exactly, I always thought heating raises the entropy of a system and cooling puts it back in the "more orderly" state. So of course it can't be symmetric. Just
by Roark66 3y ago
Exactly, I always thought heating raises the entropy of a system and cooling puts it back in the "more orderly" state.
So of course it can't be symmetric. Just like breaking a wine glass, reversing that process takes a lot more effort.
Of course I have no idea if the above makes any sense, it's just an "intuitive understanding" I somehow got.
- mjevans 3y agoMy source of the same intuitive understanding; electric bills. Power to heat, waste is more heat (just not where desired?). Power to cool is used to move the state of one side of the system to another, ideally open, side. Though this does raise the question of if it's possible to cancel energy out. I think that's likely stopped by Heisenberg's uncertainty of measurements (and exactly matching them even when measured).
- Tyr42 3y agoThough if you compared the efficiency of a heap pump for cooling and a resistive heater for heating, you might be surprised that cooling is more efficient. The intuition is that the heat pump is moving heat, as opposed to just generating it.
- nyrikki 3y agoThe disorder analogy used to explain entropy in school is flawed and it is best to disregard it entirely. Thinking of entropy as a measurement of how had it is to describe a system is a safer analogy. Gibbs free energy, or the energy in a system available for work is ∆Enthalpy - ∆Entropy * Temperature Temperature and Entropy are independent properties of a system.