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G'Day Adam;
Yep .. agree with all that ...
The first law really leads us to the recognition that to get energy conservation, heat must be a form of energy. Heat is a complex thing to track .. it ends up being measured in terms of probability. Thermodynamics is really the study of the likelihood of various outcomes, however they occur, (as you point out). So heat is energy that we more or less give up trying to track (in nitty-gritty detail). The second law (entropy) then is about what we can track, and what we can treat as random.
I need to qualify a comment I made in my last post, also. I kind of insinuated that entropy wasn't a good basis for making predictions .. well, we need a theory to do that. Thermodynamics is structured as scientific 'Laws', so I was probably out of line for expecting it to do so. Still, it sets the priorities for what to look for, in order to make those predictions.
Cheers
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