Product Description

All natural change is subject to one law. It's the second law of thermodynamics. In this volume, the acclaimed chemist and science writer P. W. Atkins shows how this single, simple principle of energy transformation accounts for all natural change. Moving from the steam engine to the nuclear age, the narrative is full of vivid examples, ideas, and images--but virtually no mathematics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #666828 in Books
• Published on: 1994-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 216 pages

From Library Journal
With this volume on thermodynamics, Scientific American launches its new line of paperbacks, which are essentially softcover releases of popular hardcover titles from the Scientific American library. Other new titles include Philip Morrison's Powers of Ten and Jeremy Sabloff's The New Archaeology and the Ancient Maya.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
P. W. Atkins, a lecturer in physical chemistry at Oxford University, is the author of numerous books, including Creation Revisited.

Customer Reviews

A book to broaden the mind
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.

At last! The Big Picture!
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.

A less-than-adequate exposition
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.