Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
You should see that as you make things bigger, the graph of arrangements becomes more sharply peaked, centered around the most likely (i.e. the highest entropy) state. When you heat a solid, you're adding energy to it. We usually think of energy as something continuous, something that flows. But when you get down to the atomic level, quantum mechanics teaches us that energy comes in discrete chunks. The Montgolfiers' next step was to test a balloon with a person as the passenger. On Oct. 15, 1783, the brothers launched a balloon on a tether withJean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, a chemistry and physics teacher, aboard. He stayed aloft for almost 4 minutes, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. This isn’t just about ice cubes. Imagine you dropped an egg on the floor. Every atomic motion taking place in this messy event could have happened in reverse. The pieces of the egg could theoretically start on the floor, hurtle towards each other, reforming into an egg as it lifts off the ground, travel up through the air, and arrive gently in your hand. The movement of every atom in this time-reversed egg would still be perfectly consistent with the laws of physics. And yet, this never happens. The Origin of Irreversibility Just like for the sheep, there’s no new law of physics that ‘tells’ the energy to spread out, or the entropy to go up. There are simply more ways to spread energy out than to keep it contained, so that's what we should expect to see happen. Higher entropy states are more probable than lower entropy ones.
And that’s just 50 atoms. When we get to an object as big as an ice cube in a glass of water, with something like 10 It turns out, you're most likely to find the sheep more or less evenly split between the two farms (the states labelled 2, 3, or 4 on the graph). Meanwhile, states where the sheep are all in one farm (labelled 0 or 6 on the graph) aren't as likely. (If you don't see this as yet, press one of the blue buttons to speed up the simulation.) In sheep land, we’ve removed the fence between two neighboring farms, each with 3 plots of land, and 6 sheep are roaming freely between them. The first free ascent of a hot-air balloon with human passengers, on Nov. 21, 1783. — Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d´Arlandes (Image credit: 2001 National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution (SI Neg. No. 93-2342)) First crewed flightBut, when we scale up these solids to having 50 atoms each, and sharing 50 units of energy, the odds of finding all the energy in one solid is about 1 in 133 billion. Now that's starting to look like a much safer bet! As you add more pieces to your system, its entropy graph becomes steeper and steeper. So you're increasingly likely to find it at a state near the peak. Meanwhile, there are only 28 possible arrangements for the state we started off in, with all 6 sheep on the top farm (the bar to the right of the graph). So we're less likely to find the sheep in this lower entropy state. So, for example, if you gave me a balloon, I could measure certain things about the gas inside it – its pressure, volume, temperature, and so on. These numbers record the macroscopic state of the gas. Given this handful of numbers, there are umpteen ways in which the gas molecules might be arranged inside the balloon. They could have different positions, and whiz about in different directions, with different speeds. So there’s a massive number of internal, microscopic arrangements (in this case, the positions and velocities of the gas molecules) that all result in the same external state (pressure, volume, and temperature of the gas). Entropy is a count of all these arrangements. The entropy of the air inside a balloon counts all the ways that the air molecules can be arranged while maintaining the same overall temperature, pressure, and volume. It is also important to choose a product that still allows for a degree of ventilation. This will prevent any damp issues from occurring. Some, such as The Chimney Balloon, feature small vents, while natural products made from wool are breathable by their very nature.
If you add those blue bars up, you'll find they add up to 462. So there are 462 ways to arrange the 6 sheep in this situation. At the time, the Montgolfiers believed they had discovered a new gas (which they called Montgolfier gas) that was lighter than air and caused the inflated balloons to rise, according to the Canadian Broadcast Corp. In reality, the gas was merely air, which became more buoyant as it was heated. The balloon rose because the air within was lighter and less dense than the surrounding atmosphere, which pushed against the bottom of the balloon. Now, let’s assume the sheep are equally likely to be in any of these 462 arrangements. (Since they move randomly, there's no reason to prefer one arrangement over another.) In that case, we're most likely to find the sheep evenly distributed between the two farms, because this state has the most arrangements (it's the biggest bar in the graph).
Counting Sheep
At this point, you might be wondering what this has to do with entropy. Well, entropy is just a fancy word for ‘number of possible arrangements’. Entropy is a count of how many ways you can rearrange the ‘insides’ of a thing (its microscopic internals), while keeping its ‘outwardly’ (macroscopic) state unchanged. (Technically it’s the log of the number of these arrangements, but that’s just a mathematical convenience and doesn’t affect our discussion.) You might’ve heard an explanation that goes like this: whenever you drop an egg, or melt an ice cube, or shatter a wine glass, you’ve increased the entropy of the world. You might also have heard the phrase, “ entropy always increases”. In other words, things are only allowed to happen in one direction — the direction in which entropy increases.
The left and right ends of the graph represent states where the energy is mostly contained in one solid, and these become very unlikely. Meanwhile, the middle of the graph represents states where the energy is evenly distributed between both solids, and these become increasingly likely. Say we’ve got three sheep. These sheep are shuffling about in a farm, pretty much at random. And this farm is split into three plots of lands. Going down this road leads us to some of the biggest unanswered questions about the cosmos: how did our universe begin, how will it end, and why is our past different from our future? Counting Sheep The Chimney Balloon is made from plastic, and is designed to be inflated, using a pump or by blowing into a pipe, to fill the chimney and prevent cold air from coming in and warm air from travelling up and out.
Why Sheep Spread Out
It’s important to keep in mind that there’s no special guiding force driving these sheep to spread out and increase entropy. It’s just that there are fewer ways to keep the sheep concentrated, and more ways to spread them out. There are fewer arrangements where the sheep (energy) are concentrated, and more arrangements where the sheep (energy) are spread out. About a month later, on Nov. 21, Pilâtre de Rozier and theMarquis d'Arlandes, a French military officer, made the first free ascent in a hot air balloon. The pair flew from the center of Paris to the suburbs, about 5.5 miles (9 km), in 25 minutes. Benjamin Franklinwrote in his journal about witnessing the balloon take off: You can see that, as you add more sheep or plots of land, the number of possible sheep arrangements grows exponentially.
So there’s a deep mystery lurking behind our seemingly simple ice-melting puzzle. At the level of microscopic particles, nature doesn’t have a preference for doing things in one direction versus doing them in reverse. The atomic world is a two-way street.
How effective chimney draught excluders are depends on a couple of factors. The main thing you need to concentrate on is ensuring you buy the right sized product for your chimney. You will need to measure your flue carefully. In some cases, it will be necessary to have a draught excluder custom made to fit.
Great Deal 
New Comment