Marcus is in a lab working on an experiment. He combines two chemicals to see if they react and the solution starts to boil. He notices that the air above the chemicals reacting has greatly increased in heat. Will the disorder of a system increase or decrease as entropy increases? Hint: Chemical reactions follow the laws of thermodynamics. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed. This law is also known as the Law of Conservation of Energy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states the energy available after a chemical reaction is always less than that at the beginning of a reaction. This is also commonly referred to as entropy. Entropy can be described as the degree of disorder in a system . That is, as energy is transferred from one form to another, some of the energy is lost as heat, and the amount of available energy decreases. As the energy decreases, the disorder in the system increases, and, by definition, the entropy increases. Ice melting provides an example in which entropy increases. Entropy essentially is a measure of the tendency of a process, such as a chemical reaction, to proceed in a particular direction.
The answer to this question is:
increase