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Re: Work and Energy and Thermo



At 11:48 PM 10/17/01 -0500, Tom Wayburn seemed to endorse the statement:
"Actually Q is _any_ work (or the fraction of the total work)
which changes the entropy and W is work which does not",

Huh? I thought W stood for work. How can we define W as a subset of the work?

At 11:51 PM 10/17/01 -0500, Tom Wayburn wrote:
Work is used to define entropy,

That may be an _example_ of entropy, but it is not satisfactory as a
definition of entropy. In particular,
1) Entropy remains well-behaved when the temperature is undefined,
unspecified, or zero. An alleged "definition" of entropy in terms of work
would have problems handling this case.
2) Any such "definition" would have problems describing any dissipative
process, such as cannon-boring. For details see
http://www.monmouth.com/~jsd/physics/thermo-laws.htm