THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS ARE SOME DEPRESSING SHIT

Ever wondered what cool sciencey stuff they are teaching undergraduates at the University of Queensland?

 Every school day I will post my newly learned cool fact... Enjoy

(Sorry to my huge base of loyal blog fans, yesterday I was unable to write my blog due to personal circumstance beyond my control.  I hope you can forgive me for not providing you with your daily fix of science. Enjoy today!)

07/03/2013

CHEMISTRY

THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS ARE SOME DEPRESSING SHIT

1^st law:

Energy is neither created nor destroyed.

This seems simple enough and not very depressing.

Energy is a thing that exists and makes up the universe that we know of and everything we see around us is nothing more than energy. Everything you are and everything you see is simply energy in different forms. So I guess it makes sense (in a mind blowing kind of way) that you would not be able to create or destroy this fundamental ‘stuff’ of everything around you.

Eg – electricity companies don’t make electricity. They convert energy into electric energy from other forms, usually fossil fuels made of large hydrocarbon atoms being  broken down into Carbon Dioxide.

Ok we move on

And This is where it gets painful.

2^nd law of thermodynamics

All Anthropic systems will spontaneously decay into a lower order. 

This lower order is known as Entropy.

Eg. Water flows downhill.

Water in a high potential energy state on top of a hill likes to flow down to low potential energy state at the bottom of the hill.

Entropy is a state of low order.

If you build something it will rust, crumble and disintegrate

If you have a closed system, it will stop running.

If it moves it will stop, if it breathes it will die, if it is warm it will become cold…

A hospital corridor near the site of the Chernobyl disaster: in a growing state of Entropy

EVERYTHING in the universe including life on planet earth, slowly yet inevitably, is moving the universes energy from a high order state to a low energy state.

What’s truly depressing is that this process is unavoidable and ever processing.

Eventually there will be no order in the whole universe and everything will be left in the lowest state of order possible.

Nothing but cold, dark nothing.

Unless the universe is going to collapse under its own gravity, (which seems ever more unlikely as we uncover more and more of its mysteries), then this cold darkness is our future.

And there is nothing we can do about it.