Apoorva Arora
Last Activity: 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.