Helen Salisbury: The inverse care law in the digital age

In the quest to identify a property that may reliably predict the spontaneity of a process, a promising candidate has been identified: entropy. Processes that involve an increase in entropy of the system (ΔS > 0) are very often spontaneous; however, examples to the contrary are plentiful. By expanding consideration of entropy changes to include the surroundings, a significant conclusion regarding the relation between this property and spontaneity may be reached. In thermodynamic models, the...

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy, or the amount of disorder in a system, increases each time energy is transferred or transformed. Each energy transfer results in a certain amount of energy that is lost—usually in the form of heat—that increases the disorder of the surroundings. This can also be demonstrated in a classic food web. Herbivores harvest chemical energy from plants and release heat and carbon dioxide into the environment. Carnivores harvest the...

Through experiments, scientists established the mathematical relationships between pairs of variables, such as pressure and temperature, pressure and volume, volume and temperature, and volume and moles, that hold for an ideal gas.

While the differential rate law relates the rate and concentrations of reactants, a second form of rate law called the integrated rate law relates concentrations of reactants and time. Integrated rate laws can be used to determine the amount of reactant or product present after a period of time or to estimate the time required for a reaction to proceed to a certain extent. For example, an integrated rate law helps determine the length of time a radioactive material must be stored for its...

A pure, perfectly crystalline solid possessing no kinetic energy (that is, at a temperature of absolute zero, 0 K) may be described by a single microstate, as its purity, perfect crystallinity,and complete lack of motion means there is but one possible location for each identical atom or molecule comprising the crystal (W = 1). According to the Boltzmann equation, the entropy of this system is zero.

Scientific Laws