BharatNotes Entropy
nounUsage in a UPSC answer
Left unchecked, institutional entropy sets in: regulatory bodies ossify, files gather dust, and accountability dissipates, so that periodic administrative reform is less a luxury than a structural necessity to arrest the slide of governance into inertia and disorder.
Synonyms
Antonyms
Word Family
entropic (adj), entropically (adv), entropies (n pl), negentropy (n)
Root
German Entropie, coined 1865 by Clausius; Greek tropē = transformation; modelled on Energie
Etymology
From German Entropie, coined in 1865 by Rudolf Clausius from Ancient Greek tropē (transformation), modelled on Energie (energy).
Memory Hook
EN + TROPE (a turning): energy 'turning in' on itself and dispersing -- think of a tidy room inevitably 'turning into' chaos. The trop- root (as in 'tropic', a turning point) signals transformation toward disorder.
How This Word Works in UPSC Writing
A measure of the disorder of a system and of the extent to which its energy has become unavailable for useful work. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, and this is the law that gives time a direction, since the underlying equations of mechanics run equally well backwards while the spreading of energy does not. Two consequences follow that questions test. No heat engine can be perfectly efficient, because some energy must always be rejected to a cold reservoir rather than converted to work. And heat flows spontaneously from hot to cold and never the reverse unless work is supplied, which is exactly what a refrigerator does, exporting more entropy to the room than it removes from the cabinet. The apparent counterexample of living things growing more ordered is not one, because organisms are open systems that export entropy to their surroundings.
Don’t Confuse It With
Entropy measures disorder and unavailable energy, while enthalpy measures the total heat content of a system, and the two combine in Gibbs free energy, which is what actually decides whether a process happens spontaneously. The first law says energy is conserved, forbidding something from nothing, while the second law says entropy increases, forbidding the complete conversion of heat into work. Negentropy describes a local decrease in entropy, which is permitted only in open systems that export disorder elsewhere.
Hindi Meaning
एन्ट्रॉपी; एन्थैल्पी for enthalpy and ऊष्मागतिकी for thermodynamics.
Common Questions
- What does the second law of thermodynamics say?
- That the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, so energy spreads out and becomes progressively less available to do useful work.
- How can living things grow more ordered if entropy always increases?
- Because organisms are open systems, not isolated ones. They maintain internal order by exporting a greater amount of disorder to their surroundings.
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