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The Second Law (Scientific American Library), by P. W. Atkins
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The novelist and physicist C. P. Snow once remarked that not knowing the Second Law of thermodynamics was analogous to never having read a work of Shakespeare's. This profusproductely illustrated volume breaks down the mathematical barriers that have prevented many from understanding this fundamental principle of energy transformation and describes the origin, atomic basis, and wide-ranging applications of this central, unifying description of all natural change.
Simply stated, the Second Law recognizes the intrinsic asymmetry in nature. Aspects of this asymmetry can be found all around us: hot objects cool, but cool objects do not spontaneously become hot; a bouncing ball comes to rest, but a stationary ball does not spontaneously begin to bounce. Oxford professor P. W. Atkins begins his examination of these seemingly random but vitally important phenomena with early observations of the steam engine and traces the deepening understanding that emerged when the atomic basis of the Law was established. He analyzes the Law from a modern viewpoint, enabling us to see how a single, simple idea encompasses all elements of natural change.
Atkins explores this idea from its first recognition through its application in engines, refrigerators, and heat pumps to its role as the driving force of chemical reactions and, finally, to the emergence of the exquisitely ordered structures characteristic of life itself.
Using striking computer graphics to develop a unified picture of nature, the author shows us how structures are built apparently out of chaos until we grasp the underlying, awesome simplicity of complexity. An appendix details how to program the generation of printouts of the concepts discussed.
- Sales Rank: #304769 in Books
- Brand: Unknown
- Published on: 1984-02-01
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 230 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Library Journal
With this volume on thermodynamics, Scientific American launches its new line of paperbacks, which are essentially softcover releases of popular hardcover titles from the Scientific American library. Other new titles include Philip Morrison's Powers of Ten and Jeremy Sabloff's The New Archaeology and the Ancient Maya.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
P. W. Atkins, a lecturer in physical chemistry at Oxford University, is the author of numerous books, including Creation Revisited.
Most helpful customer reviews
25 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
A book to broaden the mind
By A Customer
Quite a few students of chemistry and physics share a certain anxiety when it comes to thermodynamics. The word brings to mind an endless maze of partial differential equations and vague, hard-to-grasp concepts like path integrals and entropy. Entropy is a fundamental concept in nature, arguably even THE most fundamental. Regular courses in thermodynamics do not sufficiently highlight this fact. Worse, quite a few of those courses actually turn students away from the beautiful properties of entropy. Atkins' book can change all that. First of all, it is utterly comprehensible for any and all interested readers. After careful study, the reader will know more of entropy that the average college student fresh out of a thermodynamics course. Added to that, the reader will appreciate the crucial role of entropy in nature. If you're in college and are likely to run into thermodynamics, get this book and read it prior to your course. If you're out of college and still think that thermodynamics is a dirty word, this book will set you straight. It might even ensnare you to the beautiful world of entropy.
33 of 36 people found the following review helpful.
At last! The Big Picture!
By Daniel Lalonde
When in hign school, I learned from the chemistry teacher how entropy was a fundamental quantity; a measure of a system's disorder, an index of whether or not a reaction is going to be possible or not. Then, in Engineering school, I learned to compute the entropy of a system, to calculate its efficiency and to decide whether or not a process violated some fundamental law (the first, the second...).
But exactly what is entropy? How can it be understood in term of intuitive concepts? What is the relation between the enginner's entropy and the microscopic one (the disorder index)? Why is it so fundamental, yet so arcane that no one ever dared explain it except to teach us how to compute it?
P.W. Atkins answers these questions beautifully. First, he makes an historical account of how we became aware of the concept and defines it from a contemporary perpective. He very accurately and clearly dissect the fundamentals of the laws of thermodynamics. He then gives us numerous examples of how entropy is relevant to the understanding of nature's process, be it in physics, mechanics, chemistry or biology, etc. Eventually, one acquires an intuitive understanding of why these two laws are so fundamentals: why these are so important and prevalent? Why their existence is so unavoidable?
In order to undertand this book,no special mathematical knowledge is required. The logic is rigorous yet affordable and the text is very well structured. You may find the task easier if you have at least a college degree in science but all that is really required is the discipline to pay attention.
At the end of the book, you will appreciate the orderly fashion of the authors toughts. Most of all you will enjoy the very visceral pleasure of seeing one more part of nature's beauty.
52 of 63 people found the following review helpful.
A less-than-adequate exposition
By A Customer
This book is an attempt to render the second law of thermodynamics and its basic quantity-- entropy-- in nonmathematical terms comprehensible to a general reader. Atkins does well in expressing these often-difficult concepts in layman's terms; unfortunately, in so doing, his book has also succumbed to the same oversimplifications that have made the law so confusing and contradictory to students in the first place.
The book repeats the old-fashioned equivalence of entropy to disorder, in spite of the fact that while the second law (in the Boltzmann formulation) is suggestive of a trend toward disorder, the latter is a complicated concept that is not fully encapsulated by entropy. The entropy of a circumscribed system can in fact be a motor toward greater order. Atkins does allude to this notion in the later chapters that deal with ordering phenomena that cast off a correspondingly greater amount of entropy outside the system; but the treatment is surprisingly cursory, the book leaving out many crucial examples (e.g. the spontaneous particle-size separation in a Boltzmannian container with only Brownian motion, radiative energy transfer, canonical chaotic systems, aspects of polymeric molecule behaviour and organisation) that have spurred the debate about the meaning and implications of the second law in the first place.
The second law has been formulated in so many different forms and seems to say so many different things that it would have been helpful to have a "sorting out" in a book dedicated to explaining it; but this does not occur here, and all the confusion about information, different forms of order/disorder, the semantic difficulties of heat vs. mechanical energy, that make students' questions so difficult to answer-- the book fails to address these to any sufficiency. There are also the issues of reconciling the entropy concept with general relativity and gravitational fields, one of the most fascinating challenges and, here, given short shrift. The book toward its close indulges in an odd speculative and metaphysical meditation that is overgeneralised, unsupported, and entirely out of place in a work that, for all its flaws, was at least restrained up to this later portion. In teaching the second law one of the most important emphases to be made is the rigorous demand to specify the set of conditions that define the experimental system, and the lack of restraint on the author's part here is therefore quite a disappointment.
Those interested in a nonmathematical exposition of the second law should instead read Valery Chalidze's "Entropy Demystified"; J.S. Dugdale's "Entropy and Its Physical Meaning," while of a more mathematical bent, is worth the effort if you have some background in physics or applied mathematics, probably being the most thorough treatment available.
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