What the Second Law Does Not Say

This post is part of a series, Nonsense and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The Second Law does not say it is impossible for heat to be transferred from a cold body to a hot body.  The second law does not say that "disorder" must increase on the earth or anywhere else.  Life is not a counter-example to the second law; life is an example of the second law in action.

One has to be very careful about applying statistical results to a single molecule or a few molecules and remembering that increasing entropy applies to irreversible changes, not reversible ones. The second law says nothing about disorder. The second law does not prevent evaporative coolers from operating.

The second law does not contradict radiative transfer theory or global warming. The second law does not contradict conservation of energy.  In applying the second law to  cosmology, one should tread cautiously.

Subsequent posts in this series elucidate what the second actually does say and how it is misinterpreted. The next post in this series is entitled What the Second Law Does Say.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. What the Second Law Does Not Say
3. What the Second Law Does Say
4. Entropy is Not a Measure of Disorder
5. Reversible Processes
6. The Carnot Cycle
7. The Definition of Entropy
8. Perpetual Motion
9. The Hydrogen Economy
10. Heat Can Be Transferred From a Cold Body to a Hot Body: The Air Conditioner
11. The Second Law and Swamp Coolers
12. Entropy and Statistical Thermodynamics
13. Fluctuations
14. Partition Functions
15. Entropy and Information Theory
16. The Second Law and Creationism
17. Entropy as Religious, Spiritual, or Self-Help Metaphor
18. Free Energy
19. Spontaneous Change and Equilibrium
20. The Second Law, Radiative Transfer, and Global Warming
21. The Second Law, Microscopic Reversibility, and Small Systems
22. The Arrow of Time
23. The Heat Death of the Universe
24. Gravity and Entropy
25. The Second Law and Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence
26. Conclusion