entropy = "specific waste heat" ?

Aug 11, 2007 1 Replies

if I start thinking of "entropy" as really being "specific waste heat" (unharvestable energy per degree temperature), am I in any way oversimplifying, or misunderstanding the term?



It's a good approximation for thermodynamics, but it does leave out a lot of statistical mechanics content. For example, why should the waste heat be maximized for physiochemical processes?

Entropy (or more accurately the negentropy) is also a measure of the amount of information present in a system.

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