Customer Reviews

The 2nd Law: Energy, Chaos, and Form (Scientific American Library Paperback)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Atkins does the best job I know of to explain the goals and principles of thermodynamics to the layman. He is a great pedagogue, and his book is wonderful. It is neither simplistic nor arcane. It is a non mathematical introduction to thermodynamics, with the advantages and the obvious limitations of such an approach. At the outset Atkins warns us that mathematics are a tool to help us describe scientifically the world, a very powerful tool indeed, but not more. And at first it is better to get a first glimpse of thermodynamics without this tool. Then for those interested in going further mathematics become indispensable. Atkins book, I hope, will spurr many vocations ; many great physicists of the future will fondly remember Atkins book as their first marvellous introduction to the beauties of thermodynamics.

I have almost all the books in the Scientific American series and each is a gem in itself. Covering subjects as varied as gravity, cells, sound, vision and motion, these works offer a clarity of scientific exposition rarely encountered.

Many of these books are quite approachable (Powers of Ten), some are quite technical and require a knowledgable background of the subject. "The Second Law" falls somewhere between the two. The first problem is understanding what the second law says. The second problem is relating this to the universe of reality.

Perhaps the greatest problem in relating current scientific to the average layman is that the subject matter is so arcane and sophisticated. Most non-scientists (particularly considering the dismal state of science in public education) cannot grasp either the theory, mechanics or ramifications of that research - nor do they want to. The hardback book is beautiful with many illustrations. The writing is technically superb and at the same time literate and approachable. If you are a serious student of the way the universe operates, get this book.

This book is an example that science can indeed be very poetic and beautiful, and not need to be dull and boring. It is a joy to read, and I learned more about entropy reading this book than I did during my five years at the university. Highly recommended!

I graduated as mechanical engineer and I still do not grasp the 2nd Law.

This is wonderful book for those of us confused and frustrated. Its from Scientiffic American, I guess I can't go wrong.

The '2nd Law' is, of course, the second law of thermodynamics. This reference has the advantage over typical thermodynamic books in being nonmathematical, and very appropriate reading for the general reader.