Does Electromagnetic Radiation Generate Entropy? The Carnot Cycle Revisited.

The Thermodynamics of radiation is to be found in some textbooks which portray the entropy of radiation as 4/3aT(3)V, where T and V, respectively are the temperature and volume of a cavity at equilibrium with the radiation. Poynting and Thomson (1911) go through the exercise of putting a "photon gas" through a Carnot Cycle, - the only book I have found to do so, but there is an error in their calculation. One purpose of this paper is to correct that mistake, and in extension, rigorously work through the Carnot Cycle because present day students and scientists wanting to study the Carnot Cycle are unlikely to find that textbook. Feynman also dealt with the Thermodynamics of radiation, but his approach is different from that of other authors. Although the Thermodynamics of radiation superficially appears to be self-consistent, there are some queries, which need to be exposed. Firstly, the unit of entropy of radiation is Joule/K which is different from the usual unit of entropy, namely Joule/mole-K. Secondly, entropy in matter relates to atoms and molecules exchanging energy endlessly and randomly, but this is not true for photons. Thirdly, it is possible to do practical experiments in order to estimate numerically the entropy of substances or entropy changes in reactions, but for radiation, are there any experiments which can produce numerical values for the entropy? The importance of this study is that some cosmologists state that, according to the Hot Big Bang Theory, the Universe expanded isentropically and that radiation went through this isentropic process. Objections are raised against this part of the theory.