Thermodynamics

I came to academic study late. My ‘good’ school—a cross between a boot camp and a Jesuit seminary—failed totally to instil any sort of formal learning into me. After night school etc., I finally managed to achieve a half decent degree in Physics due mainly to slog and rote learning, and at an age when most people have been in work for several years. Subsequently I have become much more interested in social history and history in general, but I never regretted the science education and science paid my wages throughout my working life. 
 
C P Snow famously commented on the ‘two cultures’—arts and sciences. Our governing classes are almost exclusively drawn from the former—very occasionally a medical doctor gets a look in—and yet science, engineering, technology, and medicine provide us with the standard of living that we enjoy; science and engineering separate us from stone age culture. Snow commented that an ‘establishment’ person educated in the arts would express shock and disbelief that an engineer or scientist might be unacquainted with Shakespeare, Beethoven, or Turner. And yet that same establishment person would have no knowledge of quantum mechanics, relativity or the second law of thermodynamics, and be perfectly happy in that ignorance. One of the few things that virtually all eminent scientists agree on, is that whatever developments there are in the attempt to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics, or even to understand quantum mechanics, the second law of thermodynamics will never be superseded. It is among the most fundamental of the laws of nature.
 
Simply stated, the second law says that disorder always increases. It may appear to decrease locally, in an animal or plant for example; in fact, the ability to reverse the second law has been mooted as a test for life. Sooner or later though, the animal dies, and disorder takes over. The second law also removes the ambiguity of the arrow of time; Newton’s laws of motion can be arbitrarily reversed by changing the polarity of the ‘time’ variable, but in a real situation, the second law always separates reality from illusion. It means that ultimately the universe will run down. The energy will all still be there—first law of thermodynamics, conservation of energy—but it will be degraded to nearly absolute zero temperature. There is plenty of energy in a block of ice, but you can’t heat your house with it if all you have to work with is another block of ice…
 
Which brings me to thermodynamics as a subject for study. We did a series of lectures on it as part of my degree course. The lecturer was a nice man, Mr Sidney Weintraub. He was good hearted, close to retirement, a pillar of the local Jewish community, but a very indifferent teacher. He would shuffle and snuffle around the lecture theatre like an old badger making the weakest of mathematical jokes… I learned not a thing. If you’ve been extruded through the British educational system, you will be familiar with the very wide variation in ability of the teachers, lecturers, supervisors, professors etc. Most are adequate; a few know their subjects really well, and a small subset those, are great communicators. It is the latter, particularly in the science subjects, that are worth their weight in gold.
 
Stung by the C P Snow comment when I came across it sometime later, I decided that I needed at least a broad-brush understanding of thermodynamics since the second law is so fundamental. I have made a few, half hearted and unsuccessful attempts over the years, but when I came across the Oxford ‘Very Short Introduction’ to the laws of thermodynamics, I thought I was onto a winner. This series, published by the Oxford University Press, is, as the title suggests, a brief introduction by an eminent person in the field to a whole variety of topics in the arts and sciences. Peter Atkins is an emeritus professor of chemistry at Oxford. He has written books and won prizes for them—popular science books as well as textbooks—so he would appear to be the perfect choice to elucidate an abstruse subject. Not a bit of it. After the third ‘explanation’, that was no explanation at all, and after I read a particular paragraph four times and still could make neither head nor tail of it, I gave up. Very disappointing.
 
And then, almost by accident, I come across a course on thermodynamics on Audible, the talking books website. It was free as part of my membership and has course notes as a pdf. It is presented by Jeffrey C Grossman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the audio part of a visual presentation. It is American and chatty and lacks the visuals—in spite of the pdf which seems odd. Nevertheless, it scores over the Atkins effort in its straightforwardness and clarity, and the course notes are far more understandable than the Atkins ‘Short Introduction…’, so I shall persevere; so far, so very good. Already I’m intrigued. Entropy is not, apparently, disorder, and even scientists argue as to exactly what it really is…