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Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life 1st Edition

4.0 out of 5 stars 33 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0226739366
ISBN-10: 0226739368
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 378 pages
  • Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (June 1, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0226739368
  • ISBN-13: 978-0226739366
  • Product Dimensions: 6 x 1 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #153,738 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

By G. Bestick on January 3, 2006
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Life has both purpose and direction, assert the authors of this bold and stimulating work. Neither God nor Darwin satisfactorily accounts for life's forward momentum, but the Second Law of Thermodynamics does.

Thermodynamics began as the study of energy transformation in closed systems. The second law says that a system left to its own devices will lose its capacity to transform energy into work, eventually reaching a state of equilibrium. What's hot becomes cool, which for living systems such as you and I isn't a good thing. Our goal is to stay near but not at equilibrium by importing energy into ourselves and being smart about how much energy we use to stay in a stable state. It's a tricky balancing act: expend too much energy and you can't sustain your self over a long lifetime; use too little and equilibrium wins, bringing you to a full stop; export too much waste in the process and you damage the sources of energy you need to keep going.

In the first part of the book, Schneider and Sagan move the discussion of thermodynamics from classical closed systems to complex open systems. They label these open systems "non-equilibrium thermodynamics" or NET. What NET systems abhor isn't a vacuum, but a gradient, which is a disparity in temperature, pressure, or some other physical force across a distance. Complex systems, living or non-living, will work to degrade gradients in the most energy efficient manner possible, becoming bigger, more organized and more sophisticated in the process.
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Format: Hardcover
Works of scientific significance tend to fall into one of two categories: those that present new material, and those that reconfigure existing material into something that is new by virtue of its originality of insight. "Into the Cool" falls decisively into the second category, and Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan have created a book that is as much concerned with philosophy of science as it is about science. The book seamlessly presents the historical and philosophical evolution of a fundamental principle (the second law of thermodynamics as applied to open systems) and develops the implications of the principle in a staggeringly wide range of contexts. In doing so, the authors have avoided the gratuitous descent into the intentionally obscure that mars so much of "popular" scientific writing, and have given us a work that is engaging, lucid and supremely approachable. Their approach risks repetition of material, and the book is not immune to that criticism. In the book's finest moments, however, the authors are able to exploit that repetition by presenting their material in a variety of contexts that collectively support the validity of their argument. In the section on economics, for example (economics in a work on thermodynamics!), the authors make a persuasive case for viewing markets as organically derived from, rather than merely analogical to, the implications of the second law. The authors' treatment of this argument requires less in the way of philosophical gymnastics than might be imagined, and their exposition makes the unfolding of the logic seem almost inevitable. Because of the richness of the material, this is a work that demands more than one reading. Fortunately, the warmth and sincerity of the writing make this book a joy, rather than the heavy going that might easily have otherwise resulted. Highly recommended.
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Format: Hardcover
Stimulating book! By far, this compendium is a `huge' step in the right direction. If, resultantly, life is to be defined via energy and matter interactions, according to which thermodynamics is home, than by all means Into the Cool has done justice. If not, nevertheless, we still have ground-breaking work. In the near future, I envisage a definitive set of twelve books on the thermodynamics of human life. Into the cool will certainly be in this collection.

Libb Thims, Chemical Engineer
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Format: Hardcover
I can honestly say this book is a true paradigm shift in science. Unlike the arcane mathematics of Prigogine (to which a previous customer compared this work) Into the Cool is centered around the simple idea of energy dispersal. I saw Eric D. Schneider, the co-author Dorion Sagan, and Terry Bristol (a philosopher and lecture agent for reknowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking) present on this recently at Sigma Xi in Seattle. It seems clear from that presentation and this book that these gentleman are truly on the cusp of a major paradigm shift in science and, indeed, the way we view reality. Although the ideas center around thermodynamics and energy dispersal, they can be summarized as follows. If Copernicus showed we weren't at the center of the universe, and the astrophysicists and organic chemists showed that life wasn't made of any special stuff, so we now see that the *process* of life is also not special, but shared with other natural complex systems in the universe: Benard cells, certain chemical reactions, Taylor vortices, and even tornados all cycle matter in regions of energy flow. So does life. The authors present satellite imaging evidence that life degrades the long-wave solar radiation gradient, producing entropy more effectively than is the case without it. What this means--and it is not for the faint-hearted--is that life has a physical purpose now understood by science: to spread energy and reduce gradients (gradients are differences across a distance, and can be measured in temperature, pressure, chemistry etc.) in accord with the second law of thermodynamics. This is the law, remember, that C.P. Snow said if you don't understand it you are like someone who has never read a work of Shakespeare.Read more ›
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