Question for agnostics and atheists

[Purple Rabbit]

Nope, that is not at all what the second law states. Please be sure not to parrot something you do not understand.
What decreases according to the second law is entropy.

Reading all this stuff about thermodynamics brings back memories....

I happened to read this and I also happened to still have my "Introduction to Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics" book by Smith and Van Ness sitting on my shelf. On page 153 it says:

"Thus, the second law provides us with a general principle of great utility: All processes proceed in a direction such that the total entropy change is positive, approaching zero as a limit, as the process approaches reversibility. This conclusion can be stated mathematically by the equation

delta S total is greater than or equal to 0" (I wrote the equation out obviously)

Since delta S = S final - S initial and delta S is always positive or 0, S must always either increase or stay the same in a process. It never decreases for the total system.

So it seems you are incorrect in your last statement quoted above or you misspoke or...

You are right rjh4, entropy increases. I might have focused to much on the words used by tackattack who spoke of decreasing energy.

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Could be a typo...

Could be...but it does not seem like it since it was Tackattack that said that entropy increased and useable energy decreased and I was quoting Purple Rabbit's response.

Initially Tackattack said that the second law states that energy decreases. Energy however is conserved. The point is that energy is not the same as the ability of a system to do work. Work is just a part of the total energy balance of a system. In a isolated system of classical point particles in thermal equilibrium all energy is locked in the kinetic energy of the particles, but the kinetic energy of every particle still contributes to the total energy of the system.