612
Energy Flow in the Production of Order
16.3 What strategies are available to life systems on Earth to overcome the
limitations of order production by the limiting flux of entropy to outer space?
16.4 Light from the Sun arrives above the Earth’s atmosphere with an almost
random distribution of polarizations. If sunlight arrived perfectly polarized, how
much less entropy would it carry per unit second per square meter?
16.5 Some of the heat keeping us warm comes from the heat released by solidification of iron on the surface of the inner (solid) core of the Earth. This causes the core
to grow in radius by about 1 mm a year. (The radius of the inner core is 1220 km,
where the temperature is near 6000 K and pressure is about 330 GPa. The heat of
fusion of iron is 13.8 kJ/mol, and the density of iron at the inner core is 13 gm/cm 3 .)
From this data, calculate the Joule heat released per second, and compare with the
number in the energy-flow table.
Energy Flow in the Production of Order
16.3 What strategies are available to life systems on Earth to overcome the
limitations of order production by the limiting flux of entropy to outer space?
16.4 Light from the Sun arrives above the Earth’s atmosphere with an almost
random distribution of polarizations. If sunlight arrived perfectly polarized, how
much less entropy would it carry per unit second per square meter?
16.5 Some of the heat keeping us warm comes from the heat released by solidification of iron on the surface of the inner (solid) core of the Earth. This causes the core
to grow in radius by about 1 mm a year. (The radius of the inner core is 1220 km,
where the temperature is near 6000 K and pressure is about 330 GPa. The heat of
fusion of iron is 13.8 kJ/mol, and the density of iron at the inner core is 13 gm/cm 3 .)
From this data, calculate the Joule heat released per second, and compare with the
number in the energy-flow table.