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Maxwell's
Demon
Why Warmth
Disperses and Time Passes
by Hans Christian Von Baeyer
- Book Description
You arrive at your office and unpack your breakfast from
the local deli. The piping-hot coffee and chilly orange
juice you purchased just minutes ago are now both
disappointingly lukewarm. Why can't the coffee
"steal" heat from the juice to stay hot? Why
does even the most state-of-the-art car operate at a mere
30 percent efficiency--and why can't Detroit ever better
the odds, no matter what space age materials we invent?
Why can't some genius make a perpetual motion machine?
The answers lie in the field of thermodynamics, the study
of heat, which turns out to be the key to an astonishing
number of scientific puzzles.
If you
want to know what's happening in the physical world,
you've got to follow the heat. In Maxwell's Demon: Why
Warmth Disperses and Time Passes, physics professor Hans
Christian von Baeyer tells the story of heat through the
lives of the scientists who discovered it, most notably
James Clerk Maxwell, whose demonic invention has
bedeviled generations of physics students with its
light-fingered attempts to flout the laws of
thermodynamics. An intelligent, submicroscopic gremlin
who could sort atoms as they
flew at him, Maxwell's Demon would effectively make an
impossible task--forcing heat to flow backward--possible.
Explaining why the Demon can't have his day has been an
intellectual gauntlet taken up by a century and a half of
the world's most brilliant scientists, whose discoveries
Professor von Baeyer vividly etches.
The
centuries-old discipline of thermodynamics informs
today's most cutting-edge research in chaos, complexity,
and the grand unified theory of everything--physics Holy
Grail. Even more amazing, the study of heat turns out to
explain something seemingly unrelated--time, and why it
can run in only one direction.
With his
trademark elegant prose, eye for lively detail, and gift
for lucid explanation, Professor von Baeyer turns the
contemplation of a cooling teacup into a beguiling
portrait of the birth of a science with relevance to
almost every aspect of our lives. Readers will find
themselves rooting for Maxwell's ever-mischievous Demon
even as they come to appreciate that he is doomed to
failure.
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