Physical Significance of Entropy or of the Second Law

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. This article is intended for those students of engineering who already have some elementary knowledge of thermodynamics. It is intended to clear up a difficulty that has beset every earnest beginner of this subject. The difficulty is not one of application to engineering problems, although here too there have been widespread misconceptions,1 for the expressions developed by clausius are simple, have long been known and much used by engineers and physicists. The difficulty is rather as to the ultimate physical meaning of entropy. This term has long been known as a sort of property of the state of the body, has long been surmised to be of essentially a statistical nature, but with it all there was a sense that it was a sort of mathematical fiction, that it was somehow unreal and elusive, so it is no wonder that in certain engineering quarters it was dubbed the ghostly quantity.