Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In physics, the "path of least resistance" is a heuristic from folk physics that can sometimes, in very simple situations, describe approximately what happens. It is an approximation of the tendency to the least energy state. [1] Other examples are "what goes up must come down" and "heat goes from hot to cold" (second law of thermodynamics ...
John Earman and John D. Norton have argued that Szilárd and Landauer's explanations of Maxwell's demon begin by assuming that the second law of thermodynamics cannot be violated by the demon, and derive further properties of the demon from this assumption, including the necessity of consuming energy when erasing information, etc. [15] [16] It ...
The following is a list of people who are considered a "father" or "mother" (or "founding father" or "founding mother") of a scientific field.Such people are generally regarded to have made the first significant contributions to and/or delineation of that field; they may also be seen as "a" rather than "the" father or mother of the field.
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).
The term law has diverse usage in many cases (approximate, accurate, broad, or narrow) across all fields of natural science (physics, chemistry, astronomy, geoscience, biology). Laws are developed from data and can be further developed through mathematics; in all cases they are directly or indirectly based on empirical evidence. It is generally ...
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 ...
Terminal velocity (An object dropped through air from a sufficient height will reach a steady speed, called the terminal velocity, when the aerodynamic drag force pushing up on the body balances the gravitational force (weight) pulling the body down.) Nordtvedt effect; Newton's second law; Law of Inertia
Another way of dealing with Loschmidt's paradox is to see the second law as an expression of a set of boundary conditions, in which our universe's time coordinate has a low-entropy starting point: the Big Bang. From this point of view, the arrow of time is determined entirely by the direction that leads away from the Big Bang, and a ...