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Re: Entropy and states of matter



At 11:31 AM 2/27/02, Jim Green wrote:
>
>There ARE those scurrilous characters who say "This is Jim-Speak, whereby
>heating provided on B by A is described as negative work done on A by B."
>
>What could be more straight-forward?
>Still, no right thinking physicist will endorse this translation.... or
>will she?

Well, Brian, you may have added a complication: Heating by B on A is
usually accomplished by the hotter subsystem doing work on the cooler
subsystem but in the present case the cooler system does work on the hotter
one -- the cooling condensing molecules loose energy and do work on the
hotter molecules so we might well talk about negative work done by the
impinging system by the condensing system. /snip/
Jim Green

For a person who considers 'temperature' to be a uniform
property at the molecular level, this rebuttal is eminently satisfactory
- but
don't we believe that temperature is the macroscopic representation of a
distribution of a molecular or particulate variable?

If we do, then mixing the macroscopic description 'temperature' with
microscopic descriptors like 'molecule' is a mixed model - whereby all
sorts of uncomfortable concepts crop up!

But if I follow this line to its logical conclusion, the statistical
properties of
entropy, temperature & enthalpy are inappropriate for a microscopic model
where all is mass, motion and degrees of organization, I suppose.....



Brian Whatcott
Altus OK Eureka!