Thermodynamics: The First Enigmatic Science - Tapa blanda

Sinopsis

Thermodynamics has always been a troubled subject as its origins lie at least as much, and probably more, in the needs of engineering as in science. This led to most textbooks trying to steer a middle course that would make the subject accessible to both scientists and engineers, and this may have been why most treatments tend to keep away from the sort of mathematical sophistication that is normal in texts on electromagnetism or relativity. Sadly, this approach has persisted even after the advent of quantum mechanics, which soon turned out to have an intimate connection with thermodynamics – indeed the seminal paper on quantum mechanics was addressing a thermodynamic problem. The result is that a key discipline in physics has come to be seen as inaccessible to the more mathematically sophisticated physics students of the present day!This book does away with all this. Although it opens with a review of the historical origins of the subject’s problems, it goes on to present thermodynamics using modern mathematics and incorporates a novel introduction to quantum mechanics before developing the statistical model using both quantum mechanics and information theory.I’ve subtitled this text as “The First Enigmatic Science”. The enigma in thermodynamics is, of course, entropy. Entropy has the rather peculiar distinction that it was around and being used by physicists for the better part of half a century before some real understanding of its meaning came about. So the introductory chapter is followed by three chapters showing how the subject developed so far while this understanding was yet to be achieved. Using correct mathematics, the development is perfectly straightforward, and this also provides an introduction to non-equilibrium thermodynamics by analogy with fluid mechanics.Both in the coverage of thermodynamics itself, and in the quantum mechanics, I’ve been careful to keep alive the historical development, as in both areas the mistakes are often as illuminating as the present consensus. With the recent resurgence of questioning about the fundamentals of quantum mechanics since the publication of J.S.Bell's “Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics” in 1987, this is a necessarily topical approach; I have no doubts that despite all the Bohrs, Haldanes and Feynmans, quantum mechanics will eventually attain a perfectly clear and logical understanding that is also intuitively accessible. Physics was simply moving too far too fast a hundred years ago for all the strands being opened up not to be in conflict, and its problems are with its internal conflicts, not with its data.

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