The Story of Science

The Story of Science

or

How come

we ain't got

what we want

and

How to use

the laws of science

to get what we want

Quick answer:

Account for entropy

changes required

for the work

that people do.

How It happened

I. Before James Watt:

 Every body knew you could get a lot of work from heat. 

 Many steam devices were made to do work for people.

 Nobody knew (with numbers) how much work could be done.

 Many shops and factories were run by steam.

 James Watt in 1789 built the steam locomotive

 The British defeated Napoleon at Waterloo.

II. After James Watt: The discovery of entropy

 Nickalas Sadi Carnot said it was the steam engines that gave the British great military advantage. He analyzed the possible thermodynamic processes with pressure, volume, and temperature diagrams. He discovered the maximum possible work that can be obtained from heat energy. He discovered the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. (1820)

 Other people began studying thermodynamic diagrams and the equations that describe them. Theodore Clausius noticed that there was a mathematical animal that could only go up, never down. He named it entropy (Greek meaning: to change)

III. The mechanical equivalent of heat (1850)

 A big shock happened when Joule measured the mechanical equivalent of heat. He found it to be so big that Kelvin could not believe it, at first. It has been measured and verified many times since. The BTU was equivalent to 778 foot pounds of work. The BTU had been defined as the heat required to raise 1 pound of water by 1 degree F. So if you heat a pint mason jar 1 degree it's energy is equivalent to dropping a 10 pound weight from almost 80 ft., WOW!!  Now the BTU's that could be obtained from coal, oil, wood, beans, potatoes, everything had to be known for the design of every new working mechanical device and for human nutrition. The mad struggle for energy continues to this day. All the while something many billions of times more valuable than energy is not even being counted in some of the most important processes.

IV. Ludwig Boltzmann - defines entropy (1900)

 There is still one more shock coming. The energy equivalent of order will be found to be so big there will be a world wide rush to get all the order you can into your system so you can be the richest SOB in the whole world. AAAND (listen carefully now) when you make your environment more orderly it helps others, aaand when others have a more orderly environment you become much richer. All of this will become obvious to everybody when we start getting entropy values for human activities. Let's get the numbers, then we can talk. 

 The energy required to create order is not now properly understood by anyone. It is hidden by the use of entropy as a measure of order. Entropy is the measure of the trash, or disorder in the subject system. Yportne is a measure of the order of the system.

Clausius' entropy was defined using macroscopic analysis until in 1900 Ludwig Boltzmann showed, using statistical methods, what entropy is on a microscopic scale. In an attempt to make the 2nd Law comprehensible, many people have defined something which expresses the opposite of entropy. Neg-entropy was proposed by Erwin Schroedinger. Since entropy is a measure of the probability of a system being in its present state, we at  National Search Labs propose a parameter which measures the probability of a system NOT being in its present state. We call this parameter "yportne" (pronounced eeportnee). It really does not matter what you call it as long as you satisfy the entropy requirement as well as the energy requirement. Let's get the numbers, then we can talk. 

Leo Czilard explains Maxwell's Demon (1927)

He said if the Demon lowers the entropy in the box, then the entropy must go up in the Demon's system. He could have said if the Demon spends yportne he must get it from somewhere. Now the 2nd Law says yportne cannot be created and is as comprehensible as the first Law.

V. Entropy Happens

Entropy is a measure of the trash produced by any system.

When the entropy gets low the system is using its energy more efficiently.

When the entropy gets high most of your energy turns into useless trash. Even the elimination of the trash in general, wastes energy.

VI. Conclusion

 We better look at where our yportne comes from and how it is  spent. Until we do, chaos, including hate and war, is guaranteed.

Count your Beasleys