Abstract
IN a recent letter in NATURE1 Sir James Jeans, in replying to a criticism made by one of us2, writes: “Given perfectly level and frictionless railways, a man may move millions of tons of matter, and thereby decrease the entropy of the world enormously, without incurring any corresponding increase of entropy through the combustion of food or fuel”. Not only can this surprising statement be disproved, but the very reverse of it can be readily demonstrated. The entropy decrease associated with the sorting out of trucks depends not on the number of tons but on the number of trucks. Its magnitude would be the same if the trucks were replaced by an equal number of miniature trucks or counters or molecules. If a man were to sort out a million trucks, the entropy decrease would be of the same order of magnitude (to within a few powers of ten) as the increase of entropy when he breathes a million molecules of oxygen. To complete the proof of our assertion it is only necessary to estimate roughly how long it would take a man to sort out a million trucks and then estimate how many millions of millions of millions of millions of molecules of oxygen he must have breathed while he was doing it.
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References
NATURE, 133, 174; Feb. 3, 1934.
NATURE, 133, 99; Jan. 20, 1934.
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DONNAN, F., GUGGENHEIM, E. Activities of Life and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Nature 133, 530 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133530a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133530a0
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