Tag
#thermodynamics
7 articles
Phase Transitions
Energy pours into melting ice and the thermometer does not move. The missing joules are buying something other than speed — and following where they go explains latent heat, phase diagrams, and why ice floats.
Chemical Equilibrium
A sealed flask settles at a fixed shade of brown and stays there forever — not because the reaction ended, but because the forward and reverse reactions now run at exactly the same rate.
Hurricanes: Nature's Heat Engines
Why a hurricane is a heat engine, not a wind machine: warm-ocean evaporation and latent heat are the fuel, the Coriolis effect only organises the spin, and a warming ocean tilts the odds toward the most intense storms.
Why Weather Happens
Differential heating, adiabatic lapse rates, and latent heat — how one energy imbalance builds thunderstorms, deserts, jet streams, and a hard two-week limit on forecasting.
Electrochemistry: How Batteries Work
Split a redox reaction into two half-cells and the electrons have to detour through your device. That detour is electricity — and its voltage, its limits, and its eventual death are all predictable.
Free Energy: Why Reactions Happen
Diamond spontaneously turns into graphite and yet your ring survives — the gap between those two facts is the whole story of Gibbs free energy, the referee between energy and disorder.
Entropy and the Second Law
Gas released in a corner of a box fills the box and never gathers back — not because a force forbids it, but because overwhelmingly more microstates look spread out than gathered.