Joint products and irreversibility

The laws of thermodynamics have been employed in chapter 4 to deduce some fundamental statements about production. However, the view of chapter 4 was essentially a static one. Nevertheless, the laws of thermodynamics, in particular the Entropy Law, establish at the same time a certain temporal structure of production. Generally, the notion of entropy allows to understand how time-irreversibility, the so-called ‘arrow of time’, finds its expression in the evolution of different kinds of systems. This has been discussed in section 3.3 above. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.