Spontaneous changes are ones in which the free energy of a system decreases.

Heat
energy is also called enthalpy. When heat is released, the change in the enthalpy for
the system that is releasing the heat decreases, whereas when heat is absorbed, the
change in the enthalpy increases. While a decrease in the enthalpy makes a process
more spontaneous (favorable), the change in enthalpy alone cannot be used to predict
whether an overall change is spontaneous. There is another factor that must be
considered and that is the entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder; when a system
become more disordered, the change in entropy is positive. When a change entropy is
positive, it makes the change more spontaneous (favorable). Nature loves disorder.
But like enthalpy, changes in entropy alone cannot be used to predict whether an
overall change is spontaneous. For that you need to determine the change in the free
energy. The free energy change combines the enthalpy change and the entropy
change together, along with the temperature, to produce a quantity that can be used to
determine if a process is spontaneous or not. This is summarized in the following
equation:

where
is the change in the free energy,
is the change in the enthalpy,
is
the change in the entropy, and T is the absolute temperature in Kelvin. The following
tables lay out the conditions for when a process is spontaneous and when it is not.