An Old Poem...

The Rose and the dream

The dreamer is tired and wants to sleep
for escaping is not what he is meant to do;
found when lost he stood there
within the mist, before the Queen herself.

The Queen, with beauty and a scarlet glare,
smiling,gently, at the tired man.
The Queen, oh beloved Queen!
She had thorns in her hand and petals over her head.

The dreamer's tears were not from pain,
his faint gasps did not come from exhaustion;
nor did his sorrows come from grievous wounds,
but from his euphoria, gone long ago.

Had he not gazed that entrancing stare,
from the monarch of barbs and stems.
Had he not dreamt of her radiant demeanor,
Needless would he be of running away.

But the Queen sits on an opulent throne,
with her crimson servants lying at her feet;
So assured of her victory she is,
That a lifetime advantage she chooses to give.

The Queen just stands, bright and dreary.
Roses arise at her delicate steps.
Arrogant yet pleasing, to the dreamer she walks.
The Queen, oh Queen! Of rose and brier.

"Purpose, just purpose, from you I ask!"
As his spine trembled with an icy clasp.
The dreamer can only see the red and gold
for everywhere else in fog was inmerse.

"My child, my beloved one, purpose it what you ask?
How about your dreams, the euphoria, your light?"
The Queen replies, as spring breeze comes out
From her breathe, every man's demise.

The man, with defeat within his core,
with fatigue and weeps between his spoken voice.
"Why can't I dream beyond thou ocellus,
You profane; you harmonious Queen?"

"Those dreams you covet with your soul;
those which bring joy and affliction.
The sorrow, wistfullness, zeal, and hope;
those memories forged your mere existence".

"Those fixed portraits which build you;
they are but the wings that should lift you,
my stubborn whelp, with them should you soar
the heavens not ever concieved by your kin". 

"These feathers shall take you away, to me.
To your dream, so languished, so infinite.
Nothing before, nothing after; 
Only then, forsaken shade, my permission you have to lull".

The man, tired of fleeing, hating and dreaming;
the teardrops ablaze, as his strengths befall;
Drops his body into the cold, yet warm embrace,
Of the Queen, with petals over her head.

The wind, accompained with the roses, the loyal servants,
gathered swift at the sweet command.
The Queen and his lost child reunited at last,
enclosed together drift, as eternity past.

A Word On: Entropy

"Chaos always wins, because its better organized." 

Murphy's Law

This sentence has struck me ever since the first time I read it over 10 years ago. It holds a truly deep meaning about life in many levels and has been a source of wonder in my mind for the last decade or so, therefore it has gotten me asking, why does it hold so much truth in it?

Usually we tend to relate chaos with lack of order, with unbalance, with out-of-control situations around us, and overall an inevitable force around everything. It's only logical, if your bed is messy it won't tidy up itself unless you take time to clean it up (which is trully unfortunate because I really hate making up my bed). Or if you throw a bunch of pencils to the floor they won't go back up to your desk unless you pick them, nor will a broken phone unbreak, and the list could go on forever. These kind of situations have left to both a conclusion and a question: chaos is unvoidable, but why?

Image: pro.psychcentral.com/

One of the things I learned during my thermodynamic classes at college was that energy is basically everything. We use it in all of its forms (chemical, thermal, electrical, etc.) and it literally moves our world, ourselves and our universe. Energy is a property of the physical systems around us, and to my thinking it is best described as the capability of transformation. 

Bearing this in mind I came back to my messy bedsheets example; if my room was messy and the only way I can do something about it is spending some time and effort tiding it up, meaning I would have to spend some energy organizing my little chaotic system. So if I have to use energy to put chaos into order, hence transformating the system, maybe chaos is the opposite: detransformating, or, destroying order. 

At first it made perfect sense, energy is used to transform and create, chaos must then be the opposite, and be used to "destroy" the order in an non-reversible fashion. Non-reversible, keep this word in the back of your head. 

Image by: rawglor.deviantart.com

This hypothesis soon crumbled on the very principle that made me think of it: energy. 

If energy was a source of creation and chaos a source of destruction, how come you need energy to carry on a demolition of an old building? Why can you burn down a tree with thermal energy? 

The very idea of chaos being destruction of energy is wiped out by none other than the First Law of Thermodynamics: 

The total energy of an isolated system in a given frame of reference remains constant.

In other words, the total energy of a system cannot be created nor destroyed, because within its reference frame, it is conserved (for instance in time for continous systems). That's two birds with one stone, because this also implies that energy isn't created nor destroyed, it just transforms. This explains how I can knock down a building with some TNT: I'm using chemical energy (the exothermic, very unstable reaction going on with the TNT) to create kinetic energy (pieces of the building getting sent at high speeds in every direction). In conclusion, my first thought was wrong, as my idea of chaos being destruction of energy was nothing but energy just transforming and going elsewhere in the system. Back to square one, my room is still messy it seems.

So I was left wondering about energy going elsewhere, in some cases to places I don't want it to be (i.e. a pipeline loosing heat to the environment in an industrial process). What if chaos is related to this "mislead" energy?

Thermodynamics, luckily, had the answer just around the corner, and it came quick and forcefully: entropy. 

Image by: kidel.deviantart.com

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states:

The total entropy of an isolated system can only increase over time.

Putting it on perspective, the total entropy of the universe can only increase, meaning:

dS >0

This implies not only that you cannot have a system without entropy, but also that entropy's tendency in nature is to increase. This on itself will answer my initial question, but firs we need to know what is entropy exatcly.

Entropy is a concept that is hard to grasp outside a mathematical point of view. Elliott and Lira describe it as "A measure of disorder of a system", while Clasius (the man who coined the term in the first place) defines it as "a measure of the capacity for a body's energy to be transformed into useful work" (taken from Introductory Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics by J.R. Elliott & C.T. Lira).

Both are two sides of the same coin. Entropy is in fact a way to measure disorder in a system, by letting us know how much energy can be transformed in a way we want it or that we can take advantage of; therefore, entropy accounts for the energy that can be effectively used within a non-reversible system (remember this?)

In general, a non-reversible system is a system affected by entropy, meaning that the changes made in it cannot be turned all the way back. Let me illustrate this with a classical engineering example:

First, picture a turbine powered by steam at very high temperatures. The idea here is to take the thermal energy (heat) of our steam stream in order to make the rotor of the turbine spin and thus creat useful energy known as work. The following image can help you picture the situation:

Image: www.learnthermo.com

As you can see, steam enters the turbine (our system) at high pressure and temperature, and leaves with lower temperature and pressure, meaning some of its thermal energy was used to produce the work output of the turbine. Should this system have abscense of entropy, a.k.a. reversible, you should be able to obtain all the energy from the steam  and convert it into work. Yet if you observe in real life, the output conditions are not 100 % the results you should get if all the nrgy was to be used. The turbine has an efficiency, meaning it can only reach a certain maximum of usable energy, the rest goes elsewhere, the rest is entropy. This can be appreciated subtly by observing that the output steam is at a higher temperature than epected in a reversible system, and more subtly, in outer heating of the turbine and the sound that it produces. Energy is disoredered, it is transformed into "non-useful" things.