MadSci Network: Physics |
One doesn't really "prove" the Clausius inequality or any other statement of the second law of thermodynamics. Same goes for the first law. It is just a matter of observing in nature that heat always flows from hot to cold, that you never get 100% efficiency in a process, etc. Once we decide from nature that this is "true" with confidence, then we adopt it as a basic postulate and move forward from there. There are actually "proofs" of the Second Law that come out of statistical physics, but these proofs (the first was due to Boltzmann) have their own assumptions buried inside so one isn't really proving the Second Law from first principles, though perhaps one is starting from principles that are somewhat more basic. But for all practical purposes you can think of the Second Law as an unproved assumption, but one backed up by lots of observation of nature. One can ask the related question about "proving" a particular statement of the Second Law given another statement. And you did ask that in the other message you sent, so I'll deal with that when I get around to replying to that (by the way, in the future when you have two almost identical questions to ask it would be more polite to combine them into one message).
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