“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”
So declared C.P. Snow, CBE, in his now classic Rede Lecture of 1959, now published as The Two Cultures.
There are some who maintain that he was merely speaking symbolically; however I would beg to differ as, in my humble opinion, the Laws of Thermodynamics are every bit as foundational to an understanding of our physical world as the plays of William Shakespeare are to an understanding of our intellectual world. Alas, the trouble for me is that while I have read all but three of the plays of Shakespeare, I have yet meaningfully to understanding thermodynamics – or ever properly applied myself to the study of physics at all, for that matter.
Fortunately, just this past October, Oxford University Press added Physics: A Very Short Introduction by Prof. Sidney Perkowitz as volume number 606 in that superbly helpful series. I have already begun reading it and am finding Prof. Perkowitz’s approach both delightfully approachable and very effective. Even more, once I complete my reading of this volume, I can continue my explorations in this field through the VSI volumes The Laws of Thermodynamics by Prof. Peter Atkins and, because I approach most all such things via their history, Prof. J. L. Heilbron’s The History of Physics.
