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Probability and Entropy

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What is the change in entropy for the following "reactions"? For the purposes of this exercise treat the pennies as if this was about molecules and use Bolzmann's constant in your calculations.
a. 100 pennies that were all arranged to be heads facing up and changed to all have tails facing up.
b. 100 pennies that were arranged with heads facing up to 50% tails facing up.
c. 100 pennies that were arranged with heads facing up to 70% tails facing up.
d. Which arrangement is the most favored?

Assume you have a container with a removal baffle. On side 1 you have a collection of gas molecules and on side 2 you have different collection of gas molecules. The respective arrangements for side 1 and 2 are t .
a. What is the number of configurations available to the system when the baffle is removed and the gas molecules have mixed?
b. Compute the entropies
i. S1,
ii. S2 and
iii. S combined.
iv. What is the significance of the result?

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In this solution, we answer some problems related to entropy and probability distributions.

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3. a. The change in entropy is zero since there is only one configuration with all heads facing up and only one with all tails facing up. Thus we have S_initial = S_final = k log 1 = 0.

b. The initial entropy is zero and the final entropy is k log(100C50), where nCm = n!/(m!(n-m)!) is a binomial coefficient. (There are 100C50 = 1.01 * 10^29 possible configurations of 100 pennies with 50 tails facing up.) Thus the final entropy, and the change in ...

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