14 hours ago, Bernie said:Pretty sure that is not the whole story. If you were to evaporate all the water then that indeed will be the case. But if you stop the process at say 110C then the volume will be different to what the sugar was alone. if you take cool sugar syrup and heat it it will continue to increase in temperature.
Understood - my impression was that you wanted to go to the caramelized toffee stage. If you stay in the sirup stage(s), you will have residual water. However, your system changes from your initial
On 8/2/2021 at 11:26 AM, Bernie said:You add sugar to water
e.g. an aqueous solution of sugar (what this boiling point discussion is about) to metastable sugar melt with residual water content < 20%, so a slightly better description would be sugar with a lowered melting point. A good reference can be found here.
14 hours ago, Bernie said:Entropy is exactly why it CAN happen. Entropy (in this context) is the measure of the possibilities or any combination of states a chemical or substance can be in. If you like its a measure of the likely hood of the chemical or substance being in any possible random state.
Sorry, @Bernie - this is not the definition of entropy. Your system starts from a random state of distribution, and will continue to maximize its entropy (or “randomness”) over time. This is the second law of thermodynamics.
Your system will not return spontaneously to a state that has a higher order, e.g. by randomly forming a temperature gradient or changing part of its state above the transition temperature (irreversibility).
