How Entropy Powers The Earth (Big Picture Ep. 4/5)

Опубликовано 21 октября 2016, 13:00

This video is about how we don't just need energy to power our lives, we need *low entropy* energy! Thanks to Google Making and Science for supporting this series, and to Sean Carroll for collaborating on it! His book can be found here: penguinrandomhouse.com/books/3...

Playlist of the full video series: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoa...

Link to Patreon supporters here: minutephysics.com/supporters.h...

This video is about how we don't just need energy to power our lives, we need *low entropy* energy! This is also known as "free energy", and one way of thinking about entropy is as the lack of free energy. The sun provides us with useful, low entropy, energy in the form of photons of visible light, which are then absorbed and converted into plants, sugar, complex molecules, etc, before being radiated back into space as heat, which has much higher entropy.

Music for the series was especially composed by Nathaniel Schroeder, soundcloud.com/drschroeder

REFERENCES & ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Entropy Balance of Radiation of the Earth system sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Heat balance of global warming/climate change: skepticalscience.com/4-Hiroshi...

More on the Entropy Balance of the Earth System bnl.gov/envsci/pubs/pdf/2010/B...

The Entropy of a Photon Gas: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_g...

Sean's blog: preposterousuniverse.com/blog/...

Another article by Sean about complexity and god: preposterousuniverse.com/writi...

Sean Carroll: The Big Picture
(more great articles about entropy, etc on his blog preposterousuniverse.com)

Interactive Entropy explainer by Aatish Bhatia: aatishb.github.io/entropy

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