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  • So... what I'd really like to do

  • Let me start again...

  • So of all the videove been involved with for Sixty Symbols

  • Numberphile

  • and Brady´s million other channels

  • The one I´m least happy with by far

  • is the one we did in entropy

  • We even then did a follow up with a "solo mea culpa"

  • Where I uhm... pointed outs where there are some importants details

  • seeing where we just gloss over

  • I really wanna revisit entropy and Brady is gonna endorse me, what is great

  • What it might and might not

  • A lot starts from this

  • the work of this guy

  • a guy called Frank Lambert

  • And notice, It says Disorder- A cracked crutch

  • for supporting entropy discussions

  • So every time you hear entropy

  • mention, or the vast majority of times

  • I'm certain on the undergraduates

  • I'm certainly in the other Sixty Symbols video we did the same thing

  • We made this link between entropy and disorder

  • For a person who isn't a scientist and even for a person who is a scientist

  • that is actually a very difficult and very confusing link to make

  • because: for example

  • the argument is that, you know...

  • entropy is always increasing...

  • disorder is always increasing... How does this happen?

  • so this is from my kid´s crystal growing kit

  • So we get crystals. How do we get lovely structures like this?

  • Beautiful structures. This is the crystal structure of silicon

  • how do we get this extended over, you know

  • huge pieces of silicon

  • How much more ordered do you wanna get?

  • And then the argument is that disorder is always increasing

  • How, then, do you take, you know, atoms in a melt... or atoms in a gas phase and this how we grow silicon

  • They're pretty disordered, you would argue

  • And then they hit the surface, and they grow and they built, and they form this structure

  • So, that seems to be, from on the face of it

  • a pretty good example of something which is very disordered turn into something very ordered

  • That's the issue with using order and disorder to explain entropy

  • and this is something that this guy, Lamberd has been banging on about for quite some time and quite rightly banging on about

  • Because it's exceptionally, exceptionally misleading.

  • I wanna cover just very briefly, uhm... two aspects of this

  • You know, you could then quietly right ask me Well, you know, how it does happen then?

  • Does it breaking the secound law of thermodinamics?

  • The fact of to see in this apparent disorder to order transition

  • intead of other way round?

  • Have the laws of thermodynamics suddenly gone wrong?

  • Have we missunderstood everything?

  • The important in here is if you got to take into account the entire system

  • You've got to take into account whether the system is closed or opened

  • if those energy or matter flow

  • All of those different things, we can even reduce it further to make the argument

  • of this even simpler, the important thing that we are neglecting

  • When we talk about just the atoms forming in order or disorder

  • Is what's the role of energy

  • and in particular when those atoms bond they give off heat energy

  • and that heat energy is an exceptionally important contribution to the "disorder" of the system

So... what I'd really like to do

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