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what is second law of thermodynamics?

what is second law of thermodynamics?

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Apoorva Arora IIT Roorkee
askIITians Faculty 181 Points
10 years ago
The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems always evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, a state with maximum entropy.

The second law is an empirically validated postulate of thermodynamics. In classical thermodynamics, the second law is a basic postulate defining the concept of thermodynamic entropy, applicable to any system involving measurable heat transfer. In statistical thermodynamics, the second law is a consequence of unitarity in quantum mechanics. In statistical mechanics information entropy is defined from information theory, known as the Shannon entropy. In the language of statistical mechanics, entropy is a measure of the number of alternative microscopic configurations corresponding to a single macroscopic state.

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