i don't think that's true. snowflakes have lower entropy than the disorganized liquid water from which they are formed, but a snowflake isn't a closed system, to which the 2nd law applies.
There are some systems where a crystalline state actually has higher entropy than the corresponding liquid state! For instance, consider a packing of chopsticks or other hard rods (a crude model for the nematic liquid crystals in LCDs). Compare the "crystalline" state where ...
-
-
the rods are aligned to the "liquid" state where the rods are pointing in random directions. At sufficiently high fixed density, the *aligned* rods are entropically preferred because they have much more space to move around than the randomly-oriented rods.
-
That is, the difference in positional entropy more than outweighs the slight decrease in orientational entropy. This phenomenon is called "order by disorder"; see e.g. this survey by Daan Frenkel for many other examples https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/S0378-4371(98)00501-9 …
- 5 more replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.