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"Go back to Lethe. But don't cross over. We need you sorely." Then he passed out again. Whatever they had done to patch him up hadn't been very successful, apparently. He spent most of the time in a delirium; sometimes he was dead, and there was an ultimate coldness like the universe long after the entropy death. At other times, he was wandering into fantasies that were all horrible.
In the phenomena habitually dealt with, this number is such that, practically, the variation of entropy in a constant sense takes, so to speak, the character of absolute certainty.
It is very evident that the theorem can only be worth applying in cases where the entropy can be exactly defined; but, even when thus limited, the field still remains vast, and the harvest which we can there reap is very abundant. Entropy appears, then, as a magnitude measuring in a certain way the evolution of a system, or, at least, as giving the direction of this evolution.
This is Thomson's theory of the irreversible dissipation of energy, and it is equivalent to the doctrine of Clausius concerning the growth of what he calls Entropy.
In recording, with the aid of the two quantities, energy and entropy, the relations which translate analytically the two principles, we obtain two relations between the coefficients which occur in a given phenomenon; but it may be easier and also more suggestive to employ various functions of these quantities.
First, he showed that the principle conduces to the definition of an absolute scale of temperature; and then he was brought face to face with a new notion which allows a strong light to be thrown on the questions of physical equilibrium. I refer to entropy. It is still rather difficult to strip entirely this very important notion of all analytical adornment.
By following the route they have traced, we come to consider the principle as pointing out to us that a given system tends towards the configuration presented by the maximum probability, and, numerically, the entropy would even be the logarithm of this probability.
Atomism, in fact, tends more and more, in modern theories, to imitate the principle of the conservation of energy or that of entropy, to disengage itself from the artificial bonds which attached it to mechanics, and to put itself forward as an independent principle.
The Scout Ball could handle them: saving energy, which along with time itself, is the ultimate precious commodity of the universe governed by the laws of entropy. The Scout Ball settled through the dark turbulence undisturbed by the hissing winds. It hovered momentarily in the invisible beacon above the Richardson dome as if both attracted and repelled. It moved horizontally and settled.
A graver difficulty proceeds from its not being possible to define a difference, or an equality, of entropy between two bodies chemically different.
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