Chemical Forums
Chemistry Forums for Students => High School Chemistry Forum => Topic started by: Mangoezzz on October 25, 2018, 06:16:21 PM
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I know that a system likes to tend to towards chaos, and spontaneous reactions tend to decrease in enthalpy and increase in entropy.
I just have a problem understanding the entropy part intuitively, I understand that a system is getting more chaotic however higher entropy means higher amount of energy? Because gas particles have a higher entropy than liquid particles.
So we know that the products have a lower amount of energy 'in them' but they also have more amount of energy because they're in a more chaotic state?
Does that mean: The energy lost by the chemical reaction goes into the enclosed system where the overall entropy increases. Not the actual entropy of the chemicals themselves
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Entropy isn't a measure of chaos, really, but rather a measure of how energy is statistically distributed. There is a natural tendency for energy to be "spread out", which we call maximizing entropy. (Colloquially we may call this "chaos" or "disorder", but that's not particularly scientific.) In a chemical system there is a kind of force that directs the system toward a state of maximum distribution (spatial, if it's simple to think of it that way) of energy. However a change in entropy doesn't necessarily mean the energy of the system has changed, just the way it is distributed in the system. For example, an expanding ideal gas that loses or gains no energy will still exhibit a significant gain in entropy, because the system's energy gets spread out over a larger area.