The dispersal of energy
المؤلف:
Peter Atkins، Julio de Paula
المصدر:
ATKINS PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY
الجزء والصفحة:
ص77-78
2025-11-04
53
The dispersal of energy
We can begin to understand the role of the distribution of energy by thinking about a ball (the system) bouncing on a floor (the surroundings). The ball does not rise as high after each bounce because there are inelastic losses in the materials of the ball and floor. The kinetic energy of the ball’s overall motion is spread out into the energy of thermal motion of its particles and those of the floor that it hits. The direction of spontaneous change is towards a state in which the ball is at rest with all its energy dispersed into random thermal motion of molecules in the air and of the atoms of the virtually infinite floor (Fig. 3.2). A ball resting on a warm floor has never been observed to start bouncing. For bouncing to begin, something rather special would need to happen. In the first place, some of the thermal motion of the atoms in the floor would have to accumulate in a single, small object, the ball. This accumulation requires a spontaneous localization of energy from the myriad vibrations of the atoms of the floor into the much smaller number of atoms that constitute the ball (Fig. 3.3). Furthermore, whereas the thermal motion is random, for the ball to move upwards its atoms must all move in the same direction. The localization of random, disorderly motion as concerted, ordered motion is so unlikely that we can dismiss it as virtually impossible.1 We appear to have found the signpost of spontaneous change: we look for the direction of change that leads to dispersal of the total energy of the isolated system. This principle accounts for the direction of change of the bouncing ball, because its energy is spread out as thermal motion of the atoms of the floor. The reverse process is not spontaneous because it is highly improbable that energy will become localized, leading to uniform motion of the ball’s atoms. A gas does not contract spontaneously because to do so the random motion of its molecules, which spreads out the distribution of kinetic energy throughout the container, would have to take them all into the same region of the container, thereby localizing the energy. The opposite change, spontane ous expansion, is a natural consequence of energy becoming more dispersed as the gas molecules occupy a larger volume. An object does not spontaneously become warmer than its surroundings because it is highly improbable that the jostling of randomly vibrating atoms in the surroundings will lead to the localization of thermal motion in the object. The opposite change, the spreading of the object’s energy into the surroundings as thermal motion, is natural. It may seem very puzzling that the spreading out of energy and matter, the collapse into disorder, can lead to the formation of such ordered structures as crystals or proteins. Nevertheless, in due course, we shall see that dispersal of energy and matter accounts for change in all its forms.
Fig. 3.2 The direction of spontaneous change for a ball bouncing on a floor. On each bounce some of its energy is degraded into the thermal motion of the atoms of the floor, and that energy disperses. The reverse has never been observed to take place on a macroscopic scale.
Fig. 3.3 The molecular interpretation of the irreversibility expressed by the Second Law. (a) A ball resting on a warm surface; the atoms are undergoing thermal motion (vibration, in this instance), as indicated by the arrows. (b) For the ball to fly upwards, some of the random vibrational motion would have to change into coordinated, directed motion. Such a conversion is highly improbable.
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