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Physical and Theoretical Chemistry

Energy Is Everything

What is the third law of thermodynamics?

The most common statement of the third law of thermodynamics is that the entropy of a perfectly crystalline system approaches zero as the temperature of the system approaches zero. (Recall from “Macroscopic Properties: The World We See” that a perfect crystal is a regularly ordered lattice of atoms that exist in a repeating pattern in three dimensions with no defects or irregularities in the lattice.) This is equivalent to saying that a perfectly crystalline system has only one accessible state as the temperature approaches zero. In truth, this isn’t always strictly true since there can be multiple low-energy states that all have the similar energy, but let’s ignore this for now.



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