Wednesday 3 June 2015

Bake off: entropy increases

I baked a cake for Mrs B. I've posted before about entropy. Entropy is said to be a measure of the disorder of a system. The more disordered, the higher the entropy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy will always increase. I've posted about this before - see http://wigtonphysics.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-entropy-of-lego-durham-cathedral.html I was thinking about the number of ways that the molecules could be arranged as regards the cake. Beforehand I had separate piles of eggs, margarine, flour and sugar. Afterwards they were mixed and blended. the same molecules existed before and after. But beforehand they had to be in separate pile so the molecules were not interchangeable and there were fewer ways of swapping them around and still getting the same thing. The fewer the ways that molecules can be swapped to give you the same thing, the lower the entropy. So I'd argue that entropy does increase when you bake a cake and the Second Law of Thermodynamics is validated.