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The second law of thermodynamics can be used to determine whether a hypothetical process is reversible or not. Intuitively, a process is reversible if there is no dissipation. For example, Joule expansion is irreversible because initially the system is not uniform. Initially, there is part of the system with gas in it, and part of the system ...
In physics, Loschmidt's paradox (named for J.J. Loschmidt), also known as the reversibility paradox, irreversibility paradox, or Umkehreinwand (from German 'reversal objection'), [1] is the objection that it should not be possible to deduce an irreversible process from time-symmetric dynamics.
A prime example of this irreversibility is the transfer of heat by conduction or radiation. It was known long before the discovery of the notion of entropy that when two bodies, initially of different temperatures, come into direct thermal connection, then heat immediately and spontaneously flows from the hotter body to the colder one.
In thermodynamics and thermal physics, the Gouy-Stodola theorem is an important theorem for the quantification of irreversibilities in an open system, and aids in the exergy analysis of thermodynamic processes.
For example, if a container of water has sat in a room long enough to match the steady temperature of the surrounding air, for a small change in the air temperature to be reversible, the whole system of air, water, and container must wait long enough for the container and air to settle into a new, matching temperature before the next small ...
Landauer's principle is a physical principle pertaining to a lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation.It holds that an irreversible change in information stored in a computer, such as merging two computational paths, dissipates a minimum amount of heat to its surroundings. [1]
As this quantity H was meant to represent the entropy of thermodynamics, the H-theorem was an early demonstration of the power of statistical mechanics as it claimed to derive the second law of thermodynamics—a statement about fundamentally irreversible processes—from reversible microscopic mechanics.
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).