Entropy - The Biography of Energy

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Scientists of the 19th century spent most of their time trying to understand Entropy, what it is, the way it works, why it works that way, and the various implications. However, it is commonly accepted that - taking account of every research done on this subject - only one man really understood it and he led us to our current understanding of entropy. He told us what entropy was and why it must always increase with time, his name was Ludwig Boltzmann (1844 - 1906)

Boltzmann who was guided by the belief that mathematics could explain everything in the universe would later lead himself to a discovery that started a controversy, this controversy will then later drive him to hang himself. His theory was so grand that he understood nature on a very tiny scale, far smaller than anyone had ever reasoned or saw with their own eyes. In the mid 19th century, a small group of intellectuals were already running on the idea that the nature of the universe on a very small scale might be completely strange and different from what we know.

Heat

Looking at energy from the point of view of an atom, it became less strange than we thought. What Boltzmann first understood was that on a microscopic level, adding heat (a type of energy) to a body only meant that you are making every single atom vibrate faster. To view the world as atoms is still a very powerful idea, but it stared a lot of debate during Boltzmann's time. The challenge for a physicist at that time was that there was no way to prove his theory about the atoms, and these atoms were the pillars of what he was trying to explain. A deeper problem was that even if they accepted to see the universe as "made up of atoms", how could he have ever come up with a mathematical equation that would account for millions of atoms in a single container of solid, liquid or gas? Atoms are always moving, hitting each other, changing direction and speed. To solve this problem, Boltzmann would have to discard certainty.

After much struggle, Boltzmann discovered that he didn't need to calculate the exact speed or direction of every single atom. Using the mathematical laws of probability, he discovered that one can predict working modules of what was going on by simply calculating the probability of certain atoms travelling at a particular speed and direction. Imagine a cube of hot metal, the atoms in the cube have energy in them so they are each vibrating really fast, you can almost hear the atoms directly on top the surface of the table interacting with the atoms in the table, they vibrate individually. Just watching as they also pound progressively on their neighbours. This process continues until they are now all vibrating equally, by this time the kinetic energy used in vibrating has been shared across millions of atoms, hence we say: Energy or heat has flowed from the metal cube to the table. The entire system has changed from order to disorder, all the energy was nicely compacted in one place, now the same amount of energy has been dispersed and shared among many more atoms.

The Law of Vibration states that everything in the Universe moves and vibrates - everything is vibrating at one speed or another. Nothing rests. Everything you see around you is vibrating at one frequency or another, and so are you. However, your frequency is different from other things in the universe and that's why it seems like you are separated from what you see around you; people, animals, plants, trees and so on. In truth you are not separated - you are in fact living in an ocean of energy - as we all are. We are all connected at the lowest level

S= K log W

In statistical mechanics, Boltzmann's equation is a probability equation relating the entropy S of an ideal gas to the quantity W, the number of real microstates corresponding to the gas' macrostate and K is his constant.

This was his famous equation. What this all meant was that there are a lot more ways for things to be in total chaos than for things to be in order. This is why the universe - when left alone - would always get more complex and disordered. Boltzmann was able to discover a formula that would enable us to describe the amount of disorder in a system. This simple law is followed everywhere in the universe, form a shattered glass to an exploding star. It predicted the doom of everything, from a papa's cap to a human life, to the universe itself. The natural fate of energy in the universe is a disorder. The 2nd law of thermodynamics itself predicts that one day the universe would reach a state of maximum entropy, maximum disorder. He predicted that our universe must someday die.

Not a lot of people bought the idea, how could they, no one had ever seen an atom and no one was sure they would ever see one. They argued that atoms didn't exist! They are just names, labels, convenient fictions, calculating devices, they don't really exist, we can't observe them, etc. All through his life, he had been a depressed fellow, most of this was caused by how much people criticized his work. One evening on a holiday with his wife and children out on the beach, he hung himself! Alas.

Clausius showed us in the past that something called entropy seemed to keep getting larger, and Boltzmann showed us why and how. Within just a few years after his death, his ideas were accepted and was now a leading factor in science. But if everything's meant to end up in disorder how are we here? It is completely because of the second law that all these complexities we see exist. The great disordering of the cosmos, forming and recombining with so much time around. It is possible to tap into this flow and that's what the great engineers realized.

The Energy bubble

All through evolution, humans have a sort of different ways to utilize compacted energy, from food to wood, to fossil fuels - anything that we can exploit and tap into the flow of motion. In the 21st century, we are on a new journey to harness the power of the stuff that powers the Sun.

At Oxford, the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy has set out on a journey to recreate a small star here on earth. Of course, it is really difficult to create and contain a star here on earth, it would take big machines and brains. This is the Tokamak, this machine is designed to steal the compacted energy of hydrogen atoms. These tiny bubbles of compacted energy were formed just 3 minutes after the big bang itself. We have created a device that will allow us to take out the energy gathered inside these atoms by fusing them together to form hilum.

How it Works

Inside the machine, there are two distinct types of hydrogen gas, deuterium and tritium, going to be compressed together until it gets to a very hot phase called Plasma. This plasma, during the experiments, can get as hot as 150,000,000 degrees, thankfully the machine has powerful magnets around it that stops the plasma from touching its sides so that there can be no heat flow. When the process gets hot enough, the atoms of the hydrogen fuse with each other (when two atoms fuse to become one, one neutron is released and shot to the wall of the machine), eventually, for a short amount of time, a star the size of a long tennis ball is created. Our wish is to tap into this energy that is released in the neutron and use it to power our stoves, houses, cars, and industries, etc.

The issue here is; it is really difficult to maintain and keep the machine stable long enough for it to start the process of harvesting energy, and that is all that is in their way now, it's what they are presently working on. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe if we create machines and generators that have the ability to maintain stable fusion reactions we would have an unlimited workforce. This is thermodynamics, a science that graduated from questions about engines for war to the idea that has changed the world.

References

Wikisource - Thermodynamics

Preposterous Universe - Universe out of Chaos

Book - University Physics 14th ed by Hugh D. Young Roger A. Freedman University of California, Santa Barbar

BBC - Order and Disorder