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This Adobe Flash movie was created to demonstrate how the operation of the second law of thermodynamics can be described in terms of next node availability.
The second law concerns system entropy and, as such, it is a macroscopic description of a microscopic process. This means that on the microscopic scale, the second law can break down. However, if a system has a mass of more than a picogram, the second law is true to within parts per million. This Adobe Flash movie attempts to show how the microscopic level relates to the macroscopic result.
The emitter is situated to the left and the sink to the right. The amount of influence the sink has on attracting the particle/wavefront depends on the ratio of the attraction of the sink to the attraction of the next node. This demonstrates that the position of the next link in the chain is determined as much by the presence of an available route (the microscopic), as it is by the attraction of the sink (the macroscopic).
If there is no available route then there is no transfer - i.e. the system is completely isolated from the sink. In keeping with the real world, this Adobe Flash movie cannot show a completely isolated system, since this would require the sink attractor (pS) to equal zero, which gives a division by zero and therefore an infinite value. So we cheated and if the user enters pS = 0, it gets reset to 0.00001.
This means that there is always an a available route or "leak". An every day example would be comparing the rate of cooling of a cup of tea compared to tea stored in a vacuum flask. The tea in flask does cool down, just much slower than the tea in the cup.
It can generate shapes that simulates lightning, tree limb growth, river courses, clouds and the fracture lines in glass. Try playing around with the input figures and see what happens. Each one is guaranteed to be unique! |
