Information and Entropy; Energy and Exergy
Explore the fundamental physics behind the origins of the climate crisis, including entropy, information theory, and exergy.
Course Information
Learn for Free
About this Course
If energy is conserved, how can we have an energy crisis? Why is it harder to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere than it is to put it in?
This online course from the MIT Department of Physics will teach you how to answer these questions through an exploration of fundamental physics. Designed for global citizens who wish to better understand the origins of the climate crisis and contribute to our energy transition, as well as those interested in information theory, this course explores three different approaches to understanding entropy. It also covers the following topics:
- Why more is different
- Probability
- information theory
- irreversibility
- the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics
- temperature and heat capacity
- Carnot cycles and efficiency
- Entropy of mixing
The course ends with an introduction to the idea of exergy (not energy) as the quantity that we produce in power plants and use to run our technology. We apply this idea to examples such as the calculation of different energy (really exergy) storage technologies.
What you'll learn
- Basic probability applied to large numbers
- Introduction to thermodynamics and entropy
- Introduction to statistical mechanics
- Entropy of Mixing
- Exergy
Prerequisites
8.01.2x – Classical Mechanics Energy Conservation, Collisions
Meet your instructors
Krishna Rajagopal
William A. M. Burden Professor of Physics
After growing up in Toronto, Professor Rajagopal did his undergraduate work at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. He obtained his doctorate at Princeton University in 1993 and spent three years at Harvard as a Junior Fellow. He then spent one year at Caltech before coming to MIT in 1997. He became the Associate Head of the Department of Physics in 2009, served as the Chair of the MIT faculty from 2015 to 2017 and as MIT’s Dean for Digital Learning from 2017 to 2021.
Professor Rajagopal has also described the properties of the superfluid, color superconducting, quark matter that may lie at the centers of neutron stars, providing a clear understanding of the properties of matter at extraordinarily high densities. His work shows that cold quark matter at the highest densities is the QCD analogue of a superconductor but that if you could look at it using ordinary light it would look like a transparent insulator.
