In chemistry, a solid mass of crystal provides another good example of a entropically-low system. Any heat energy remains controlled as well, with certain cold pockets, like the refrigerator, and hot pockets, like the oven, with different temperatures that don’t spread to the rest of the house. Any mechanical energy of motion, such as water and gas moving through pipes, remains tightly controlled and directed.

The mass that makes up the house is ordered and exact to form the walls and furniture. Low EntropyĪ system low in entropy involves ordered particles and directed motion. The letter “ ” serves as the symbol for entropy.Īs we’ll find out in a later section, entropy has a lot of use for chemists and physicists in determining the spontaneity of a process. This means that as a system changes in entropy, the change only depends on the entropies of the initial and final states, rather than the sequence (“path”) taken between the states. Importantly, entropy is a state function, like temperature or pressure, as opposed to a path function, like heat or work. Topics Covered in Other ArticlesĮntropy is a measure of how dispersed and random the energy and mass of a system are distributed. In this article, we discover the meaning of entropy and its importance in thermodynamics, in both the universe and within a system.

Entropy in thermodynamics