Source of book: Borrowed from the library
This book is one of the best non-academic science books I have read. It is all about the history of thermodynamics from Carnot to the (more or less) present. The strength of the book is the way it explains concepts clearly and simply, yet with the detail necessary for a true explanation, not just a hand wave.
I want to mention in connection with this book, Carlo Rovelli’s classic, The Order of Time, which I read last year. The latter book is definitely a bit more complicated and goes really deep into the nature of time and its relationship to entropy, so I think that it might be a good idea to read Einstein’s Fridge first, to get the thermodynamic background. If you are already a science nerd, perhaps this isn’t necessary, but I do think this book is an excellent foundation for understanding.
I’m not going to get too much into the details of the book itself, because no explanation I could give would be as good as the ones in the book.
I will just give a bit of an overview, some of my favorite stuff, and a few quotes.
First, the existence of the universe as we know it is the result of uneven distribution of entropy. Areas of low entropy enable energy (and matter, which is another form of energy) to flow to areas of higher entropy. This flow enables work, time, and what we experience as existence. (As I said, if you want your mind bent significantly, read the Rovelli book.)
The book starts, therefore, with the first investigations of thermodynamics, which started with the steam engine. Like a certain amount of science, this was driven by economics - how to make engines more efficient. But inquiring minds always go beyond the immediate problem to explore the why and how of our universe. And also, one can often make a profit with inferior technology.
Then as now, commercial success was not necessarily aligned with innovation.
Likewise, the book notes that some scientific developments go by unnoticed for decades, because they don’t yet have the practical results.
Hindsight, however, is no guide to how Bernoulli’s contemporaries responded to “the kinetic theory of gases.” The truth is eighteenth-century physicists paid it little heed. Perhaps without any urgent need for scientific inquiry - improving steam engines, say - they had no need to do so. It is a prime example of how a scientific theory, however good it is, may disappear from view if it has no cultural, social, or economic relevance to society. Bernoulli’s writings on heat were written over a century too early.
With hindsight, we can see that humans can fly because of his insights. (To name just one…)
By the end of the book, we are talking about how entropy relates to black holes and event horizons - and that whole discussion is fascinating as well. It also ties in with another fun science book I read years ago, The Little Book of Black Holes. The universe is weird and fascinating.
It may come as a surprise to some, but we really didn’t have the first two laws of thermodynamics until 1865. That’s not much more than 150 years ago. And yet they underpin literally all of the technology we take for granted today.
One thing I very much liked about the book was that it highlighted some of the scientists that you don’t tend to read about much in school textbooks. To be clear, these are very important people in the history of science, but are unjustly neglected for some reason.
Two in particular that I noted were Ludwig Boltzmann, who among other things, applied statistics to the study of thermodynamics, insisted that atoms and molecules were real in an era when that idea was unpopular, and first anticipated the idea of the Big Bang - a beginning of the universe.
His life ended tragically, unfortunately. He was already likely bipolar, and took criticism very hard. Max Plank, who would eventually come around to agreeing with Boltzmann, was a particularly harsh critic. During an episode of depression, Boltzmann committed suicide, failing to live long enough to have his ideas thoroughly vindicated.
Although I knew his name - I’m a nerd - I didn’t realize how much of what we now take for granted in our science of molecules in motion and heat transfer originated with him.
He also has a badass quote in the book:
“It must be splendid to command millions of people in great national ventures, to lead a hundred thousand to victory in battle. But it seems to me greater still to discover fundamental truths in a very modest room with very modest means - truths that will still be foundations of human knowledge when the memory of these battles is painstakingly preserved only in the archives of the historian.”
The other name that I was glad to see was Emmy Noether. Women tend to get the short shrift when it comes to credit for science, although I note that there has been some progress on this lately. Her story is full of the usual bullshit - she was forbidden to get her university degree despite being brilliant, sexism plagued her existence her entire life, and the scientific establishment ignored her work even as it was acknowledged as important.
I probably can’t explain her major insight all that well, but Einstein credited her work as foundational for much of his. (Richard Feynman, who should have known better, failed to credit her while citing her theorem of symmetry and conserved quantities.)
As the book puts it, despite being relatively unknown, “much of the work underpinning modern particle physics derives from Noether’s theorem.”
Another point in the book that seems relevant is this one:
[S]ometimes, as important as who writes the words is who reads them.
One group of readers and writers who doesn’t come off well in this book are the philosophers. All too often, they were in conflict with the scientists, particularly when it came to the idea of the heat death of the universe. Again, we can turn to Boltzmann for a pithy quote.
“Shouldn’t the irresistible urge to philosophize be compared to the vomiting caused by migraines?”
One of the most mind-bending chapters is the one on information and entropy. If you want to really go down the rabbit hole, this one is for you. Storing information takes energy - just look at the AI data farms for an idea how much. But even if the physical storage took zero energy, it is established that the information itself requires energy and an increase in entropy. As I said, this is crazy stuff.
There are a couple of things from this chapter that I want to note.
First is the insight from Claude Shannon (who worked extensively with Alan Turing) on communication.
ALL communication is encrypted.
Think about that for a minute. As you read my blog, we communicate because both you and I have the encryption key: a knowledge of the English language and the knowledge of the visual or audible symbols we use to represent it.
The other bit I found fascinating is the passage on how living organisms process information. The act of reproduction is itself an information transfer at the cellular level.
The book talks about the abundant and common bacterium, E. Coli. We have many millions of these in our intestines - they are a real part of us and our function. Because they are easy to study, they were used to calculate the amount of information needed for their reproductive process. Then, by measuring the reproduction rate and the energy consumed, they were able to calculate how much energy that information processing took.
Shockingly, it turns out that E. Coli is incredibly efficient compared to human-built computers. Even our most efficient calculation devices use 10,000 times as much energy for each bit of information processed. That’s crazy!
There is so much more in this book, of course. Anyone with an interest in science will find it fascinating.
I’ll end with one last thing, from the epilogue. The author notes that we have known about the mechanism of the greenhouse effect and the problem of spewing carbon dioxide from fossil fuels into our atmosphere for more than 200 years. The alarm was first raised in the 1860s by John Tyndall, who did experiments proving the way carbon dioxide blocks infrared. By 1917, Alexander Graham Bell was advocating for replacing fossil fuels with solar power. This all is nothing new.
The author notes that one major reason he wrote the book is that he felt that general ignorance of thermodynamics was one reason that the special interests who preserve the subsidies for fossil fuels (including these days, Trump and his goons) are able to deceive the public.
Educating people on the science is important. Educated and informed people are more likely to understand reality and act in accordance with it.
So, I too will promote this book. Educate yourself. Don’t fall for the propaganda. Build a better world.
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