Question

Please answer each question and give an explanation.

4. "Why aren't explosions reversible? Why, for example, couldn't the effects produced when the nitrate- laden freighter Grandcamp vanished in a thunderclap at 9:13 a.m. April 16, 1947, obliterating its crew and two hundred bystanders, flinging a steel barge fifty yards inland, knocking down two light planes cir- cling overhead, breaking windows in every house of the neighboring town of Texas City, and destroying in an inferno a multimillion dollar chemical plant, be reversed in every respect? Why couldn't the atoms and molecules in the bits and pieces of this explosion, in the twisted wreckage, in the dismembered bod- ies, in the billowing smoke, and in the raging fires, spontaneously reassemble themselves into the original objects?" Henry A. Bent, The Second Law: An Introduction to Classical and Statistical Thermodynamics (Oxford University Press: New York, 1965)

Answer 1

Thee second law of thermodynamics says, the entropy of an isolated system can increase, but not decrease. A simple explanation for irreversility of explosion is that during explosion, there will be a great heat energy loss or dissipation due to intermolecular friction and collisions. This energy will not be recoverable if the process is reversed.