Thursday, June 8, 2017

thermodynamics - Intuitive understanding of the definition of entropy


In Wikipedia, the definition of entropy goes like this: $ d S = \dfrac{\delta q_{\rm }}{T}$. The literal interpretation of this equation is that some amount of heat transferred into a system, if the temperature of the system is high, the entropy is low. Wikipedia also said that the entropy stands for the "waste energy" which means the amount of thermal energy that cannot be used to do work. So entropy is a function of the state of a system.


My question is, why does the equation above mean "waste energy"?


There are a few similar questions I found here (like The definition of entropy), but I don't think they address this "waste energy" concept.




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classical mechanics - Moment of a force about a given axis (Torque) - Scalar or vectorial?

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