Entropy: The Resolution of a Century-Old Mystery

Author: Tang Suye
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-07-01
Features: Why, after 150 years of human effort and wisdom, are we still unable to explain the various puzzles raised by a single physics concept? The proposal of the entropy concept and the second law of thermodynamics marked an extremely important milestone in the history of science. Even today, as science has expanded into a vast array of fields, entropy remains a concept of special significance across all scientific disciplines. Because it first, it is still the only one that universally expresses the characteristics of "change" and the direction of time. It first explains the meaning of the direction of change from a global perspective and expresses time as an internal property of "change." The emergence of the entropy concept had an extremely profound impact on the fundamental perspective of how science should understand the natural existence and evolution of the world—its worldview. However, the introduction of the entropy concept also brought serious confusion to physics. Due to the lack of a "measurable quantity" definition, the meaning of this physically defined concept, which is uniquely defined in a peculiar way, remains deeply puzzling. Strictly speaking, in 1854, Clausius merely proposed a concept without explaining the physical significance of entropy. The results achieved by classical thermodynamics were powerless to explain the physical meaning of entropy, as they could not explicitly state what entropy is, but only describe how entropy changes.