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The second law of thermodynamics is a physical law based on universal empirical observation concerning heat and energy interconversions.A simple statement of the law is that heat always flows spontaneously from hotter to colder regions of matter (or 'downhill' in terms of the temperature gradient).
While the numbering of the laws is universal today, various textbooks throughout the 20th century have numbered the laws differently. In some fields, the second law was considered to deal with the efficiency of heat engines only, whereas what was called the third law dealt with entropy increases.
The idea that we can remember the past and not the future is called the "psychological arrow of time" and it has deep connections with Maxwell's demon and the physics of information; memory is linked to the second law of thermodynamics if one views it as correlation between brain cells (or computer bits) and the outer world: Since such ...
The arrow of time is the "one-way direction" or "asymmetry" of time. The thermodynamic arrow of time is provided by the second law of thermodynamics, which says that in an isolated system, entropy tends to increase with time. Entropy can be thought of as a measure of microscopic disorder; thus the second law implies that time is asymmetrical ...
Second law: The acceleration of an object of constant mass is proportional to the net force acting upon it. Third law: Whenever one body exerts a force upon a second body, the second body exerts an equal and opposite force upon the first body. Nielsen's law: A high-end user's internet connection speed grows by 50% per year.
Similarly, when the system at temperature expels heat in magnitude | | = into a colder (cold) reservoir (at temperature ) in an infinitesimal step (called the step 2), then again, for the Second Law of Thermodynamics to hold, one would have, in a very similar manner: = = Here, the amount of heat 'absorbed' by the system is given by , signifying ...
Action principles start with an energy function called a Lagrangian describing the physical system. The accumulated value of this energy function between two states of the system is called the action. Action principles apply the calculus of variation to the action. The action depends on the energy function, and the energy function depends on ...
Research concerning the relationship between the thermodynamic quantity entropy and both the origin and evolution of life began around the turn of the 20th century. In 1910 American historian Henry Adams printed and distributed to university libraries and history professors the small volume A Letter to American Teachers of History proposing a theory of history based on the second law of ...