ShmoopTube

Where Monty Python meets your 10th grade teacher.

Search Thousands of Shmoop Videos


Physics Videos 34 videos

Physics: Isaac Newton
33 Views

Isaac Newton. Who was he? Why do we need to know about him? In a physics course, no less? Well, he's only the most famous physicist in history, and...

Physics: The Basics of Trigonometry
35 Views

What are the basics of trigonometry? And why are we learning about this in a physics course? Both good questions. In this video, you'll learn about...

Physics: Unit Analysis and Graphical Data Analysis
36 Views

It's time to make our liters and meters work together. Enough of the bickering, right? In this video, we'll do some unit analysis, covering SI Unit...

See All

Physics: Putting Momentum and Energy Together: Let’s Bang Stuff Against Other Stuff 689 Views


Share It!


Description:

What is the second law of thermodynamics? That's the one about a Thermos being the most dynamic of all drinking containers, right? Uh, wrong. Basically, it has to do with entropy, chaos, and heat, oh my.

Language:
English Language
Subjects:

Transcript

00:01

No the second law of thermodynamics Why making a mis

00:06

is just part of physics into chaos Cleaning doesn't violate

00:14

the laws of physics But your parents The key to

00:21

a happy life is to make sure everything is in

00:24

its place But you spend most of your waking life

00:27

making sure things are organized and properly stored The rest

00:31

of your life will be so much happier and sure

00:33

you could take this advice too far Theoretically But we

00:36

have to do everything we can to fight disorder because

00:38

the universe is fighting back against us Stupid messy universe

00:42

What does a clean bedroom have to be with physics

00:44

to answer that question let's talk about thermodynamics The first

00:48

law of thermodynamics says that energy can't be destroyed or

00:51

created All the energy in the universe already exists It's

00:54

not going anywhere And no new energy is going toe

00:58

walk through the front door The second law of thermodynamics

01:00

actually has a few different definitions or different ways We

01:03

can understand it Have you ever dropped a few ice

01:06

cubes in a glass of soda and then forgot it

01:08

on the counter I haven't But let's assume you have

01:11

when you come back It's a gross water down disaster

01:13

What happened Heat transfer happened That's what heat moves from

01:16

the warmer soda into the colder ice Cubes making them

01:19

melt so why didn't it work the other way around

01:22

Why didn't the heat go from the ice cubes of

01:24

the soda Sure the ice cubes are super cold but

01:27

they still have internal energy but it would be pretty

01:29

freaky if you put ice and soda and the ice

01:32

somehow got colder and yeah turns out that never happens

01:35

It's actually impossible it would break the second law of

01:38

thermodynamics One way to explain the second law is to

01:41

say that he'd always flows from a higher temperature system

01:44

to a lower temperature system and it never ever goes

01:47

the other way around That just makes sense it's one

01:50

of those things that's so obvious you wonder why they

01:52

even had to write it down I'm not judging but

01:54

it turned out that the second law is a little

01:56

more complicated than that because the second law of thermodynamics

01:59

is really about entropy which is a fancy science word

02:02

for disorder or chaos The best definition of the second

02:06

law of thermodynamics is as follows in all natural processes

02:10

The total entropy of a system and its surrounding environment

02:13

either stays the same or increases entropy Never decreases To

02:18

put that a normal person speak things always become more

02:21

disorderly if we consider both the system and the environment

02:24

around them Let's say it's a wonderful day for fun

02:27

and we get to spend eight hours organizing the house

02:31

It doesn't get any better than that does it Just

02:33

a full day of organizing and tiding by the time

02:36

you're done it's almost as if you can't detect any

02:39

sign of human life at all It's perfect it's Wonderful

02:42

it's Sorry What was i saying Oh right entropy So

02:46

we just showed that there can be less disorder in

02:48

the universe At least here in our little pocket of

02:51

it Right Sorry But now first of all any time

02:53

you have that much fun you're going to work up

02:55

a sweat That means heat came off of you and

02:58

went into the air And when you heat molecules up

03:00

they move around and vibrate and just get all worked

03:02

up which means they get more chaotic and as you

03:06

scurry around putting things away had also disturbs molecules in

03:09

the air opening and closing dresser drawers putting things on

03:12

hangers The joyful act of throwing junk Away all of

03:14

that involves friction which means heat which means chaos There

03:18

is no escaping it it's enough to drive you crazy

03:21

but we don't get crazy because crazy is chaos and

03:23

chaos is the enemy keep calm and clean on another

03:26

example of this happens when we have a bouncy ball

03:28

We've all played with one of these super balls that

03:31

bounce like crazy right If you drop a super ball

03:33

without adding any extra energy to it it'll bounce back

03:36

up pretty high but it won't bounce all the way

03:39

back up to where it started Part of that is

03:41

due to gravity Part of that is also due to

03:43

entropy right before the ball hits the ground It's got

03:46

a lot of kinetic energy as it hit the ball

03:49

do forms a little creating elastic potential energy Then it

03:53

snaps back into its original shape which is why it

03:56

bounces back up into the air The ground also deformed

03:59

a little bit too And all of this d formation

04:01

makes the molecules all jumpy So some of the kinetic

04:04

energy of the ball is transferred into internal energy of

04:07

the ball and the ground internal energy Means ah higher

04:11

temperature And in fact if you had some thermometer keeping

04:14

track of the super ball you'd see it tick up

04:16

just a little bit like one or two tenths of

04:18

a degree Maybe the ground's temperature would go up a

04:21

teeny bit too Since some of the kinetic energy is

04:23

converted into internal energy the ball loses some goof on

04:27

its bounce and you guessed it more chaos is created

04:30

There's just no way around it Okay Circling back How

04:33

is entropy related to our first explanation of this thermodynamics

04:37

law Remember we said that heat flows from the warmer

04:40

system to the cooler system Think of it like this

04:43

which is more orderly A block of ice or a

04:45

bowl of water It's the ice without a question Molecules

04:49

and a solid are tightly aligned there's no molecular slipping

04:52

and sliding like you havin a liquid and in general

04:55

a colder system has less chaos than a warmer one

04:58

The molecules are moving more slowly they're vibrating less their

05:01

little molecular shoes air neatly stacked up Ah hot system

05:05

means chaos galore Molecules banging into each other electrons flying

05:09

around willy nilly shoes never being put Away oh it

05:12

makes me it's just thinking about it Entropy will always

05:15

increase or stay the same If heat float out of

05:18

a cooler system and into a warmer system that would

05:20

mean the colder system would become more orderly That's never

05:24

going to happen Another way to think about the second

05:26

law of thermodynamics is toe pop the hood on your

05:28

car assuming you don't have an all electric car than

05:31

your engine has pistons which means it depends on heat

05:34

which makes it well a heat engine and an internal

05:37

combustion engine just like the one in this car has

05:40

pistons A piston basically hangs out in a hollow cylinder

05:43

at the top of the cylinder The piston is like

05:45

a plunger that creates a tight seal to keep all

05:47

the air inside So we've got gas inside the pittston

05:50

just hanging out doing it gas thing when suddenly a

05:53

heat source appears This makes the molecules in the gas

05:56

get excited and less dense which creates pressure in the

05:59

piston which pushes the piston up which makes the gears

06:02

of the engine turn which makes the wheels turn And

06:04

what do you now you're driving on The highway at

06:06

a sensible speed of course five miles under the speed

06:09

limit is best Okay so the gas expands greatjob gas

06:12

But if this process happens only once that's not going

06:15

to get you very far things have to cool down

06:17

so the piston khun sink back down and the whole

06:19

process can repeat it in a car This happens hundreds

06:22

of times a minute Where does that heat go Bingo

06:25

Out of the tailpipe any kind of heat engine has

06:28

to be able to dump heat into what's called a

06:31

reservoir In this case reservoir doesn't mean a big lake

06:34

full of drinking water It means something big enough to

06:36

be able to absorb all the heat that the engine

06:38

needs to get rid of In the case of a

06:40

car that means the heat goes through the tailpipe and

06:42

out into the atmosphere The atmosphere is big enough that

06:45

heat from a car doesn't have much effect on the

06:47

overall temperature Of course when you have a bunch of

06:50

cars with a bunch of pollution and greenhouse gases well

06:53

that's a topic for another much more depressing video With

06:56

the pistons going up and down we know that force

06:58

is being applied and things are moving which means work

07:01

is being done but since all the heat that's generated

07:03

is dumped into the exhaust system this process isn't one

07:06

hundred percent efficient And that brings us up to our

07:09

third and final way of looking at the second law

07:12

of thermodynamics It's impossible for a heat engine to convert

07:15

heat completely into work without any other effect In fact

07:20

there's a nice and clean equation to go along with

07:22

this idea the efficiency of a heat engine that's what

07:25

the epsilon stands for equals the work done w divided

07:29

by the heat that's input that's the cue sub h

07:32

because he can't be totally converted into work work will

07:36

always be less than the heat input and efficiency will

07:40

always be less than one Not everything in life is

07:42

about cars you know no matter what you're one uncle

07:45

who's obsessed with hot rods might say here's a basic

07:47

diagram of how another type of heat engine works We've

07:50

got a high temperature reservoir on the one end that

07:52

feeds into the engine which partially converts the heat toe

07:55

work Then it sends the excess heat That wasn't converted

07:58

down the line to the low temperature reservoir let's say

08:01

this engine does five thousand jewels of work while producing

08:04

nine thousand jewels of heat what's the efficiency of this

08:07

bad boy we just went over the equation for heat

08:09

engine efficiency but let's make sure we know how to

08:11

actually use it There has to be a difference in

08:14

temperature from the heat source to the cold reservoir otherwise

08:17

heat wouldn't flow and that would leave us with an

08:19

engine that date a whole lot of nothing Or maybe

08:22

something worse than nothing kind of defeats the whole purpose

08:25

of an engine And according to our thermodynamic lawyer the

08:28

engine doesn't convert all of the heat into work so

08:31

what's leftover has to exit the system So we've basically

08:34

got two different kinds of heat here We've got the

08:36

heat that enters the system we call that que ce

08:39

of h then we've got the heat that leaves the

08:41

system will make that cues up L so what do

08:44

we know in this situation For one thing we know

08:46

that the heat engine produces nine thousand jewels of heat

08:49

Is that the heat coming into the engine or leaving

08:52

the engine That would be our new friend q Sub

08:54

l since the engine is producing it and not taking

08:57

it in this nine thousand jewels is what the engine

08:59

is dumping into the reservoir And then we've got our

09:02

five thousand jewels of work Of course our efficiency equation

09:05

tells us that a heat engines efficiency equals the work

09:08

produced over the heat entering the engine We still don't

09:11

know how much heat is coming in but it's not

09:13

too tricky to figure out After all we know that

09:16

an engine is going to produce two things work that's

09:18

been converted from heat and heat not converted to work

09:21

So if we add these together we've got our starting

09:24

heat which means that we can rewrite our efficiency equation

09:27

by swapping out the heat coming into the engine for

09:29

the heat leaving the engine plus the work done Now

09:32

we just have to pop in our numbers and we're

09:34

all good Five thousand jewels divided by fourteen thousand jewels

09:37

gives us an efficiency of thirty five point seven percent

09:41

which isn't great I certainly hold myself to a higher

09:43

standard than that but that's the way It goes with

09:45

heat engines they're just not that great with the whole

09:48

efficiency thing Now let's say we've got an engine that

09:50

takes in sixty four thousand five hundred jewels of heat

09:53

and gives up fifty three thousand nine hundred jewels and

09:56

exhaust what's our efficiency here are equation uses work and

10:00

the heat input to figure this out but we don't

10:03

have work here That's okay though we can tackle this

10:05

in two different ways First we confined the work by

10:07

subtracting the heat leaving from the heat entering that tells

10:11

us how much heat was converted into work In this

10:13

case that comes to ten thousand six hundred jewels divide

10:17

that by good old cues up h and we've got

10:19

an efficiency of sixteen point four percent The other way

10:23

to figure this out is to start with one If

10:25

an engine was one hundred percent efficient the work would

10:27

equal the heat coming in so this ratio would equal

10:30

one From that we can subtract the result of the

10:32

heat leaving the system divided by the heat coming in

10:35

So one minus fifty three thousand nine hundred jewels over

10:38

sixty four thousand five hundred jewels gives us sixteen point

10:41

four percent efficiency See like the old saying goes there's

10:44

more than one way to clean the stove And of

10:46

course we always need to remember that as a result

10:49

of all this inefficiency and he dumping more entropy is

10:52

introduced into the universe There's no getting away from that

10:55

which is why i hate this stupid second law Why

10:58

can't we just make things more easily Wouldn't that make

11:01

the universe a better place No one actually likes chaos

11:04

do they Everything moving around going crazy no one and

11:07

forcing any rules people just doing whatever they want eating

11:10

whatever they want not caring about anything Tacos in the

11:13

street there are toilets to be clean young man Sometimes

11:16

i swear i'm the only one who cares about order 00:11:18.893 --> [endTime] in the universe

Related Videos

Jane Eyre Summary
123034 Views

When you're about to marry the love of your life, not many things could stop you. However, finding out that your future hubby is keeping his crazy...

What is Shmoop?
91430 Views

Here at Shmoop, we work for kids, not just the bottom line. Founded by David Siminoff and his wife Ellen Siminoff, Shmoop was originally conceived...

ACT Math 4.5 Elementary Algebra
492 Views

ACT Math: Elementary Algebra Drill 4, Problem 5. What is the solution to the problem shown?

AP English Literature and Composition 1.1 Passage Drill 1
1039 Views

AP® English Literature and Composition Passage Drill 1, Problem 1. Which literary device is used in lines 31 to 37?

AP English Literature and Composition 1.1 Passage Drill 2
683 Views

AP® English Literature and Composition Passage Drill 2, Problem 1. What claim does Bacon make that contradicts the maxim "Whatsoever is delig...