"The Second Law recognizes that there is a fundamental dissymmetry in Nature... All around us are aspects of the dissymmetry: hot objects become cool, but cool objects do not spontaneously become hot; a bouncing ball comes to rest, but a stationary ball does not spontaneously begin to bounce. Here is the feature of Nature that both Kelvin and Clausius disentangled from the conservation of energy: although the total quantity of energy must be conserved in any process (which is their revised version of what Carnot had taken to be the conservation of the quantity of caloric), the distribution of that energy changes in an irreversible manner. The Second Law is concerned with the natural direction of change of the distribution of energy, something that is quite independent of its total quantity."
Thermodynamics

January 1, 1970

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Original Language: English

Sources

P. W. Atkins, The Second Law (1984)

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thermodynamics