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

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!

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.

REFERENCES & ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Entropy Balance of Radiation of the Earth system http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0038092X9290097T

Heat balance of global warming/climate change: http://www.skepticalscience.com/4-Hiroshima-bombs-worth-of-heat-per-second.html

More on the Entropy Balance of the Earth System https://www.bnl.gov/envsci/pubs/pdf/2010/BNL-81482-2008-JA.pdf

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

Sean's blog: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/05/11/big-picture-part-four-complexity/

Another article by Sean about complexity and god: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/writings/dtung/

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

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

Minute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics -- all in a minute!

Created by Henry Reich