Энтропия: Жылу энергиясының жоғалуы және термодинамиканың дамуы

The concept of entropy developed in response to the observation that a certain amount of functional energy released from combustion reactions is always lost to dissipation or friction and is thus not transformed into useful work. Early heat powered engines such as Thomas Savery's (1698), the Newcomen engine (1712) and the Cugnot steam tricycle (1769) were inefficient, converting less than two percent of the input energy into useful work output; a great deal of useful energy was dissipated or lost. Over the next two centuries, physicists investigated this puzzle of lost energy; the result was the concept of entropy. In the early 1850s, Rudolf Clausius set forth the concept of the thermodynamic system and posited the argument that in any irreversible process a small amount of heat energy δQ is incrementally dissipated across the system boundary. Clausius continued to develop his ideas of lost energy, and coined the term entropy. Since the mid 20th century the concept of entropy has found application in the field of information theory, describing an analogous loss of data in information transmission systems.

In 1803, mathematician Lazare Carnot published a work entitled Fundamental Principles of Equilibrium and Movement. This work includes a discussion on the efficiency of fundamental machines, i. e. pulleys and inclined planes. Carnot saw through all the details of the mechanisms to develop a general discussion on the conservation of mechanical energy. Over the next three decades, Carnot's theorem was taken as a statement that in any machine the accelerations and shocks of the moving parts all represent losses of moment of activity, i. e. the useful work done. From this Carnot drew the inference that perpetual motion was impossible. This loss of moment of activity was the first ever rudimentary statement of the second law of thermodynamics and the concept of 'transformation energy' or entropy, i. e. energy lost to dissipation and friction. Carnot died in exile in 1823. During the following year his son Sadi Carnot, having graduated from the École Polytechnique training school for engineers, but now living on half pay with his brother Hippolyte in a small apartment in Paris, wrote Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire. In this book, Sadi visualized an ideal engine in which any heat (i. e., caloric) converted into work, could be reinstated by reversing the motion of the cycle, a concept subsequently known as thermodynamic reversibility. Building on his father's work, Sadi postulated the concept that "some caloric is always lost" in the conversion into work, even in his idealized reversible heat engine, which excluded frictional losses and other losses due to the imperfections of any real machine. He also discovered that this idealized efficiency was dependent only on the temperatures of the heat reservoirs between which the engine was working, and not on the types of working fluids. Any real heat engine could not realize the Carnot cycle's reversibility, and was condemned to be even less efficient. This loss of usable caloric was a precursory form of the increase in entropy as we now know it. Though formulated in terms of caloric, rather than entropy, this was an early insight into the second law of thermodynamics.

In 1876, physicist J. Willard Gibbs, building on the work of Clausius, Hermann von Helmholtz and others, proposed that the measurement of "available energy" ΔG in a thermodynamic system could be mathematically accounted for by subtracting the "energy loss" TΔS from total energy change of the system ΔH. These concepts were further developed by James Clerk Maxwell [1871] and Max Planck [1903].

The term entropy is often used in popular language to denote a variety of unrelated phenomena. One example is the concept of corporate entropy as put forward somewhat humorously by authors Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister in their 1987 classic publication Peopleware, a book on growing and managing productive teams and successful software projects. Here, they view energy waste as red tape and business team inefficiency as a form of entropy, i. e. energy lost to waste. This concept has caught on and is now common jargon in business schools. In another example, entropy is the central theme in Isaac Asimov's short story The Last Question (first copyrighted in 1956). The story plays with the idea that the most important question is how to stop the increase of entropy.

When necessary, to disambiguate between the statistical thermodynamic concept of entropy, and entropy like formulae put forward by different researchers, the statistical thermodynamic entropy is most properly referred to as the Gibbs entropy. The terms Boltzmann–Gibbs entropy or BG entropy, and Boltzmann–Gibbs–Shannon entropy or BGS entropy are also seen in the literature.