So... what I'd really like to do
Let me start again...
So of all the video I´ve been involved with for Sixty Symbols
Numberphile
and Brady´s million other channels
The one I´m least happy with by far
is the one we did in entropy
We even then did a follow up with a "solo mea culpa"
Where I uhm... pointed outs where there are some importants details
seeing where we just gloss over
I really wanna revisit entropy and Brady is gonna endorse me, what is great
What it might and might not
A lot starts from this
the work of this guy
a guy called Frank Lambert
And notice, It says Disorder- A cracked crutch
for supporting entropy discussions
So every time you hear entropy
mention, or the vast majority of times
I'm certain on the undergraduates
I'm certainly in the other Sixty Symbols video we did the same thing
We made this link between entropy and disorder
For a person who isn't a scientist and even for a person who is a scientist
that is actually a very difficult and very confusing link to make
because: for example
the argument is that, you know...
entropy is always increasing...
disorder is always increasing... How does this happen?
so this is from my kid´s crystal growing kit
So we get crystals. How do we get lovely structures like this?
Beautiful structures. This is the crystal structure of silicon
how do we get this extended over, you know
huge pieces of silicon
How much more ordered do you wanna get?
And then the argument is that disorder is always increasing
How, then, do you take, you know, atoms in a melt... or atoms in a gas phase and this how we grow silicon
They're pretty disordered, you would argue
And then they hit the surface, and they grow and they built, and they form this structure
So, that seems to be, from on the face of it
a pretty good example of something which is very disordered turn into something very ordered
That's the issue with using order and disorder to explain entropy
and this is something that this guy, Lamberd has been banging on about for quite some time and quite rightly banging on about
Because it's exceptionally, exceptionally misleading.
I wanna cover just very briefly, uhm... two aspects of this
You know, you could then quietly right ask me Well, you know, how it does happen then?
Does it breaking the secound law of thermodinamics?
The fact of to see in this apparent disorder to order transition
intead of other way round?
Have the laws of thermodynamics suddenly gone wrong?
Have we missunderstood everything?
The important in here is if you got to take into account the entire system
You've got to take into account whether the system is closed or opened
if those energy or matter flow
All of those different things, we can even reduce it further to make the argument
of this even simpler, the important thing that we are neglecting
When we talk about just the atoms forming in order or disorder
Is what's the role of energy
and in particular when those atoms bond they give off heat energy
and that heat energy is an exceptionally important contribution to the "disorder" of the system