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Comment by srfilipek | Hacker News Reader

> thermodynamics might seem to demand that a battery only deteriorates over many charge-discharge cycles.

Well that's just nonsense.

Any armchair "physicist" claiming that entropy must decrease over time is completely ignoring the fact that the battery is getting energy from an outside source every time it's charged.

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I almost feel like this is a straw man to make this controversial. I don't see why anyone, even a layman, would say this.

> even a layman

Agreed. As far as I remember, the chemical batteries in phones circa 2005 behaved like this: you'd get gradually improving battery life over the first few cycles and then start to experience normal battery deterioration.

So long as nature is paid back its entropy in full it seems to be happy.

A false "entropy of matter natural law" argument used to be forwarded by "evolution debunkers." Richard Dawkins debunked this fake natural law with a thought exercise involving an hourglass with water in one chamber and salt in the other. You can tilt the hourglass to mix the salt and water in one chamber, but if you sit the device in the sun, such that the sun shines on the full chamber, you will eventually see the hourglass return to a state where water is in one chamber and salt is in the other.

It's too bad no one ever did this on YouTube. That would be highly persuasive.

I see what you mean (entropy always increases is valid only in a closed system assumption). But didn't you mean "claiming that entropy must increase" instead of "decrease" in your sentence?

Whoops, you're right.

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