1、Times Arrow Murphys Law Activation Energy Chemical Kinetics Chemical BondsThis site shows that some ancient questions about “things going wrong“ in our lives have surprisingly simple answers in modern basic chemistry (even things happening to us which cause that painful cry of “Why me?“)Still more i
2、mportant to ones philosophy about life, these chemical ideas can startle us into seeing how fortunate we all are: that things dont go wrong more often! Well talk mainly about down-to-earth things - common solid objects of wood, metal, and bone, not about complex computer chips or programs going wron
3、g (nor about personal relations that fall apart. Even chemistry has limits.)Simple things often are involved in annoying or deadly happenings to us: breaking a surfboard (that then hits us), having a tire blow out, being in a fire in Malibu,flying the X-1 (as Chuck Yeager had to) with a corroded bat
4、tery cableor riding a horse and being thrown - ending up with a broken neck. Why? Why do we get harassed or even have our lives ruined by events like these?Life is hard. But its harder if you dont know how the material world works! Here are some of the powerful keys to understanding from chemistry:S
5、tudents: If youre in a time bind or an exam is coming up,go here for a shorter approach to understanding the second law and entropy.The e-mail address is Next Page Last PageFrank L. Lambert, Professor Emeritus Version 6.1, September 2005Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA 90041The Encyclopedia Brit
6、annica gave this site an Internet Guide Award and allows a direct search link here to its Concise Encyclopedia Articles. Thus, albeit in brief summaries, you can access the entire span of knowledge in the Britannica - all of science, the humanities, and practical matters in the world. The Second Law
7、 of Thermodynamics!Times ArrowMurphys LawEntropyQ: Who cares about the second law of thermodynamics?A: Anyone who wonders how the material world - our world of energy and matter -works. Q: Big deal? A: The biggest, most powerful, most general idea in all of science. Why paper, trees, coal, gas and a
8、ll things like them burn (and why people “should“ spontaneously catch fire in air), why sand and dry ice even in pure oxygen cant ever burn, why the sun will eventually cool down, why iron rusts (but not why it rusts faster nearer the ocean), why there are hurricanes or any weather at all on earth,
9、what makes things break, why houses get torn apart in tornadoes or explosions, why everything living tends to die. Thats for starters.Q: Just STARTERS? OK, OK, Im impressed. So, what IS the second law of thermodynamics? Well, wait a minute, whats the first law?A: The first law is very simple and imp
10、ortant but pretty dull: You cant create or destroy energy.You can just change it from one form to another, for example, electricity to heat, heat that will boil water and make steam, hot steam to push a piston (mechanical energy) or rotate a turbine that makes electricity that in turn can be changed
11、 to light in a light bulb or to sound in an audio speaker system, and so forth. Thats it. Important but dull.The second law of thermodynamics looks mathematically simple but it has so many subtle and complex implications that it makes most chem majors sweat a lot before (and after) they graduate. Fo
12、rtunately its practical, down-to-earth applications are easy and crystal clear. These are what well talk about. From them well get to very sophisticated conclusions about how material substances and objects affect our lives.Q: Sounds fair. Im listening.A: Look at the direction that energy flows in a
13、ny happening or process or event. That is the first step to understanding what the second law of thermodynamics is and what it applies to. Energy spontaneously tends to flow only from being concentrated in one place to becoming diffused or dispersed and spread out. (Later well come back to those two
14、 tricky words “spontaneously“ and “tends“.) Thats it, the big idea. The perfect illustration is: A hot frying pan cools down when it is taken off the kitchen stove. Its thermal energy (“heat“) flows out to the cooler room air. The opposite never happens.Q: Come on. All this build up for that dumb ex
15、ample? A: Dont put me down. I could have snowed you with differential equations and diagrams instead of what you see everyday. Were being practical and visual rather than going the math route, essential as that is in chemistry. The big deal is that all types of energy spread out like the energy in t
16、hat hot pan does (unless somehow theyre hindered from doing so) They dont tend to stay concentrated in a small space; they flow toward becoming dispersed if they can - like electricity in a battery or a power line or lightning, wind from a high pressure weather system or air compressed in a tire, al
17、l heated objects, loud sounds, water or boulders that are high up on a mountain, your cars kinetic energy when you take your foot off the gas. All these different kinds of energy spread out if theres a way they can do so. Get the picture? The second law of thermodynamics summarizes that totally diff
18、erent events involving all kinds of energy have a common cause. A blowout in a tire or a car battery shorting out or slowly running down - what could seem to be more unlike than those! Yet the reason for their occurring is the same, the tendency for concentrated energy not to stay localized, to disp
19、erse if it has a chance and isnt hindered somehow. A major goal in life is to find true BIG ideas that describe how the world works, to understand why and how things happen around us in terms of a small number of basic principles. Principles that can be tested and checked. You cant do better than th
20、e second law of thermodynamics. And the direction of energy flow is just a tip of the iceberg of that law.Q. Iceberg? Titanic iceberg?A. A. Come on now. You know thats just a figure of speech to give a feeling for the size of this principle. But. OK, lets get literal: Run that Titanic movie as the s
21、hip hits the iceberg. See those steel plates ripped open and the ship begin to sink. Realistic, right? Can you imagine a real happening in which the reverse occurs? A sinking ship whose steel side heals up as it comes up out of the water and floats? Ridiculous. Too stupid to think about. But why is
22、it stupid? Because it is so improbable from your and my experience. Only a movie run backward would show that kind of unrealistic fantasy. The second law isnt some weird scientific idea. It fits with everything common happening that we know.Our psychological sense of time is based on the second law.
23、 It summarizes what we have seen, what we have experienced, what we think will happen. Sinking ships are like rocks rolling down a mountain - as they sink, their potential energy due to being high above sea-bottom is diffused, spread out to the water that they push aside (or, in the case of mountain
24、 rocks, diffused as they roll down to the valley and hit other rocks, give those a bit of kinetic energy, and warm them slightly by friction.) In a video that is run backward, you may have laughed at some diver who zooms up from the water to a ten-meter diving board, but youre never fooled that the
25、video is going forward, i.e., that you are seeing an event as it actually happened in real time. Unconsciously, you are mentally comparing what you see now with your past practical experience - and that has all followed the second law. Even though you may never have heard of the law before, in the y
26、ears of your everyday experience you have seen thousands and thousands of examples of energy flowing from being concentrated to becoming diffused. A swimmer doesnt come shooting up out of the water to the diving board, rocks in a valley dont suddenly roll up a mountain, outside air doesnt rush into
27、a flat tire, batteries dont get charged by sitting around. Those events all would have energy spontaneously become more concentrated, the opposite of energy spreading out. We sense that videos or movies are shown in the right direction of showing time going forward only if the events in them agree w
28、ith our lifetime experience about the direction of energy flow: concentrated to dispersed and spread out. The second law points the direction of how we feel time goes.Q. So thats why people call the second law “times arrow“?A. You got it. Now lets clear up those tricky words, “spontaneously“ and “te
29、nds“ in the statement of the second law, “Energy spontaneously tends to flow only from being concentrated in one place to becoming diffused and spread out.“ Q: Why bother? “Spontaneously“ means fast, quick, ad lib .A: Hold it! That may apply to people, but were talking about how things and chemicals
30、 behave. In the second law “spontaneously“ means only that any energy which is available in the object or substance for diffusing will spread out from it - if given a chance. It doesnt have anything to do with how fast or slow that occurs after the dispersal of energy starts, or even when it might s
31、tart. Thats why “tends“ is so important to understand as part of the second law. The energy available in a hot frying pan or in a loud BOOM from a drum immediately and rapidly begins to spread out to their environments. Nothing hinders that from happening. Lots of ordinary and also unhappy events ar
32、e like that. But there are an enormous number of “energy diffusing“ second-law happenings that are hindered so they dont occur right away. Heres a simple illustration: If I hold a half-pound rock in my fingers so it is ready to fall, it has potential energy concentrated in it because it is up above
33、the ground. If the second law is so great and powerful, why doesnt the energy that has been concentrated in the rock spread out? Obviously, it cant do that because my fingers are “bonding“ to it, keeping it from falling. The second law isnt violated. That rock tends to fall and diffuse its energy to
34、 the air and to the ground as it hits - and it will do so spontaneously by itself, without any help - the second I open my fingers and “unbond“ the rock. Q: Is that really so important?A: Yes, it is. Many philosophers and novelists learned about the second law only from physicists.Unfortunately, phy
35、sics emphasizes what happens in a closed or isolated system of tiny particles rather than in our real open-flow world of trees, shiny steel, sunshine, rocks and people, the world of sun energy and things made out of chemicals. Thus, many readers of popular philosophy articles and recent novels have
36、been misled and frightened by talk about the second law as a fast-approaching doomsday. The writers pass too quickly over the fact that it is a tendency rather than a prediction of what will happen right away. In many real-world chemicals and things the second law can be obstructed or hindered for m
37、illions of years. Certainly, the mountains of the world havent all slid down to sea level in the last several hundred centuries! Similar to my fingers holding the small rock (but millions of times more tightly), even overhanging stone in cliffs or mountains is bonded, chemically bonded, to adjacent
38、atoms in the stone and so the stone cant obey the second law tendency for it to fall to a lower level. Here, as in countless other examples, the second law is blocked by the strength of chemical bonds. It takes a huge number of repetitions of outside energy input like freezing and thawing and earthq
39、uakes and windy rainstorms to break the bonds along even a weak bond-line, make a crack, and free particles or pebbles or rocks so they can follow the second law by falling to a lower level. (But even then, they may just fall into a mile-high valley and be kept from dropping any closer to sea level;
40、 so here in a different way the second law is further hindered.) Blockage of the second law is absolutely necessary for us to be alive and happy. Not one of the complex chemical substances in our body and few in the things we enjoy would exist for a microsecond if the second law wasnt obstructed. It
41、s tendency is never eliminated but, fortunately for us, there are a huge number of compounds in which it is blocked for our lifetimes and even far longer.Q About time we got to something human. Are we through with rocks?A: Yes, but dont forget what they have illustrated. I think it is helpful to see
42、 some of the ways the second law works in the ordinary dusty world of actual objects before looking at its relation to pure substances, the chemicals that make up those objects. Chem profs approach the second law the other way around, starting with atoms and molecules first. And thats certainly OK.
43、Professors rightfully avoid much talk about the behavior of big visible things at all. In the limited time of a chemistry course they can only develop the nature of atoms and molecules and of chemical substances. Objects made from chemicals like a gear or a bridge or a wooden house or a book or a bo
44、ne just have to be assumed to behave like their constituent substances. What they do because they are big things composed of tiny molecules just has to be left for other courses or our future experience. Well go further to find how the second law affects common objects and how it is really the mothe
45、r of all serious Murphys Laws that apply to things. (Well omit the zillions of humorous or stupid variations about the way fallible humans behave, as well as all the problems surrounding computers and programs!) Q: The second law and Murphys Law - theyre related?A: Yes, but I shouldnt have mentioned
46、 it. First, we need to know more about bad things that can happen to us because of the behavior of chemicals in the objects around us. For a grim example, wooden houses burn down with disastrous financial loss even when people arent killed. Whats going on here in terms of energy flow? Wood and paper
47、 are both primarily cellulose. Paper is easier to experiment with so lets think about its burning in air. When paper catches fire and burns, theres a lot of energy given out as heat and some as yellow light. Its well known now that the products of the combustion of cellulose with the oxygen of the a
48、ir are carbon dioxide and water. (The slight amount of black ash is due to the clay that was on the paper adsorbing a small amount of carbon.) Once started, the burning is spontaneous -i.e., the process goes on by itself without any further help after a match starts it - and also the burning is real
49、ly fast. Now, if all that energy is flowing out in this reaction of paper with oxygen, the paper and oxygen must have had a lot more energy inside them before the reaction than do the carbon dioxide and water after the reaction - as shown in the diagram above. Whats happening here is a beautiful illustration of the predictions of the second law. Systems (groups) of chemicals - or objects made from them (like sheets of paper or houses) - tend to react if they have more energy bou
