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Title: The 2nd Law : Energy, Chaos, and Form by P. W. Atkins ISBN: 0-7167-6006-1 Publisher: W H Freeman & Co. Pub. Date: 15 August, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (6 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Beautiful Exposition
Comment: 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.
Rating: 1
Summary: A less-than-adequate exposition
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Entropy without the math
Comment: 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.
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Title: Warmth Disperses and Time Passes : The History of Heat by HANS CHRISTIAN VON BAEYER ISBN: 0375753729 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 15 June, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Molecules (Scientific American Library Series, No 21) by Peter William Atkins ISBN: 0716750198 Publisher: Scientific American Library Pub. Date: March, 1988 List Price(USD): $32.95 |
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Title: Atoms, Electrons, and Change: A Scientific American Library Book by Peter William Atkins ISBN: 0716750287 Publisher: W H Freeman & Co. Pub. Date: July, 1991 List Price(USD): $32.95 |
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Title: Timing of Biological Clocks (Scientific American Library, No 19) by Arthur T. Winfree ISBN: 071675018X Publisher: Scientific American Library Pub. Date: December, 1987 List Price(USD): $32.95 |
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Title: From Quarks to the Cosmos: Tools of Discovery (Scientific American Library Series, Vol. 28) by David N. Schramm, Leon M. Lederman ISBN: 0716760126 Publisher: W H Freeman & Co. Pub. Date: October, 1995 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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