It is commonly argued that the spectacular increase in order which has occurred on Earth does not violate the second law of thermodynamics because the Earth is an open system, and anything can happen in an open system as long as the entropy increases outside the system compensate the entropy decreases inside the system. However, if we define ‘‘X-entropy’’ to be the entropy associated with any d...

Entropy is a state function. The entropy increase principle tells us that under isolated or adiathermal conditions, the spontaneous development of a system from a state of non-equilibrium to a state of equilibrium is a process of entropy increase, in which a state of equilibrium corresponds to a state of maximum entropy. When the system is in a state of equilibrium, it is also at its most chaot...

A diagnostic framework to investigate the role of processes around and during tropical cyclogenesis is presented. The key framework metric is the ratio of bulk differences of moist entropy over differences of angular momentum between an inner and outer region of a tropical disturbance or cyclone. This ratio is hypothesized to decrease and become negative as both the high-entropy core and low-le...

Estimators for differential entropy are proposed. The estimators are based on the second order expansion of the probability mass around the inspection point with respect to the distance from the point. Simple linear regression is utilized to estimate the values of density function and its second derivative at a point. After estimating the values of the probability density function at each of th...

It has been recognized for some time that, even perfect conductors, the interaction Casimir entropy, due to quantum/thermal fluctuations, can be negative. This result was not considered problematic because it thought that self-entropies of bodies would cancel this negative yielding a total entropy positive. In fact, cancellation seems occur. The positive self-entropy perfectly conducting sphere...

This is a short review of the statistical mechanical definition of entropy production for systems composed of a large number of interacting components. Emphasis is on open systems driven away from equilibrium where the entropy production can be identified with a logarithmic ratio of microstate multiplicities of the original macrostate with respect to the time-reversed state. A special role is t...

According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, an overall increase of entropy contributes to the driving force for any physicochemical process, but entropy has seldom been investigated in biological systems. Here, for the first time, we apply Isothermal Titration Calorimetry (ITC) to investigate the Mg(2+)-induced spontaneous stacking of photosynthetic membranes isolated from spinach leaves. Af...

In this paper we discuss the question of whether the entropy of cosmological horizon in some asymptotically de Sitter spaces can be described by the Cardy-Verlinde formula, which is supposed to be an entropy formula of conformal field theory in any dimension. For the Schwarzschild-de Sitter solution, although the gravitational mass is always negative (in the sense of the prescription in hep-th/...