What is entropy? - Jeff Phillips
View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/what-is-entropy-jeff-phillips There's a concept that's crucial to chemistry and physics. It helps explain why physical processes go one way...
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There's a concept that's crucial to chemistry and physics. It helps explain why physical processes go one way and not the other: why ice melts, why cream spreads in coffee, why air leaks out of a punctured tire. It's entropy, and it's notoriously difficult to wrap our heads around. Entropy is often described as a measurement of disorder. That's a convenient image, but it's unfortunately misleading. For example, which is more disordered - a cup of crushed ice or a glass of room temperature water? Most people would say the ice, but that actually has lower entropy. So here's another way of thinking about it through probability. This may be trickier to understand, but take the time to internalize it and you'll have a much better u...
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There's a concept that's crucial to chemistry and physics. It helps explain why physical processes go one way and not the other: why ice melts, why cream spreads in coffee, why air leaks out of a punctured tire. It's entropy, and it's notoriously difficult to wrap our heads around. Entropy is often described as a measurement of disorder. That's a convenient image, but it's unfortunately misleading. For example, which is more disordered - a cup of crushed ice or a glass of room temperature water? Most people would say the ice, but that actually has lower entropy. So here's another way of thinking about it through probability. This may be trickier to understand, but take the time to internalize it and you'll have a much better u...
