Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
For example, temperature and pressure of a given quantity of gas determine its state, and thus also its volume via the ideal gas law. A system composed of a pure substance of a single phase at a particular uniform temperature and pressure is determined, and is thus a particular state, and has a particular volume. The fact that entropy is a ...
Death is the termination of all vital functions or life processes in an organism or cell. [ 31 ] [ 32 ] One of the challenges in defining death is in distinguishing it from life. Death would seem to refer to either the moment life ends, or when the state that follows life begins. [ 32 ]
One example is the liquid–vapor critical point, the end point of the pressure–temperature curve that designates conditions under which a liquid and its vapor can coexist. At higher temperatures, the gas comes into a supercritical phase, and so cannot be liquefied by pressure alone.
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).
With the development of statistical mechanics, the third law of thermodynamics (like the other laws) changed from a fundamental law (justified by experiments) to a derived law (derived from even more basic laws). The basic law from which it is primarily derived is the statistical-mechanics definition of entropy for a large system:
Scarcity plays a key role in economic theory, and it is essential for a "proper definition of economics itself". [3] "The best example is perhaps Walras' definition of social wealth, i.e., economic goods. [3] 'By social wealth', says Walras, 'I mean all things, material or immaterial (it does not matter which in this context), that are scarce ...
Born's definition was specifically for transfers of energy without transfer of matter, and it has been widely followed in textbooks (examples: [28] [29] [30]). Born observes that a transfer of matter between two systems is accompanied by a transfer of internal energy that cannot be resolved into heat and work components.