Fun Little Facts on My Quest to Understand Entropy

Those who have been reading this blog since the beginning will recall that I am on a lengthy quest to prove that Planck's Constant really is the fundamental quantum of entropy. And so whenever I learn new facts about entropy, I like to write them down here.

1. First, the potential temperature of a packet whose state changes in accordance with adiabatic, reversible means is directly proportionate to its microstates. In other words, high potential temperature packets have high entropy and low potential temperature packets have low entropy, which to a first order approximation greatly simplifies the entropic analysis of mesoscale and synoptic systems.

2. Crystals tend to the highest symmetry possible, because higher symmetry means a greater number of possible positions for any individual atom (i.e. microstates). Hence, crystals tend to have high entropy. Hence, we have the cool third law of thermodynamics, which says that a perfect crystal at absolute zero has zero entropy, which would be more obvious for less regular structures. Unfortunately, water ice mau violate the Third Law of Thermodynamics (possibly because of quantum effects, thereby introducing our happy friend, Planck's Constant.)

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