Abstract

Second law thermodynamics’, as currently understood, is here proved to be a body of knowledge essentially different from that of Clausius. The rejection on logical grounds of its basic tenet –heat and work as energy forms of the same quality in reversible processes- leads, through a revision of Clausius’ work, to a new body of knowledge, ‘the Negentropic Formulation’, taken by this author to be the true second law of thermodynamics. In it the total entropy change for any given work-producing thermodynamic process is found to be determined by the combination of the opposite sign contributions of the entropic (work degrading) and negentropic (work producing) transformations in it taking place. The efficiency-dependent prevalence of one of these opposites over the other opens the door for irreversible processes with positive, negative, or zero total entropy changes. This notion is at the center of a testable prediction pertaining self-organizing phenomena.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.