Dorky Poll: Thermodynamics

1) You cannot win (homogeneity of time plus Noether's theorems),
2) You can only break even on a very cold day (Carnot efficiency).
3) It never gets that cold (division by zero is undefined).

HOWEVER, negative temps kelvin are trivially achieved: masers, lasers, NMR, EPR, MRI, saturation-induced transparency, adiabatic demagnetization of paramagnetic salts (a refrigerator!). The interested reader is invited to adapt such strategy to boost rest mass to transluminal velocities.

(We all know how easily fabricated are isolated dynamic macroscopic systems that never reach thermodynamic equilibrium. Boltzmann must be taken with a grain of... diamond).

I thought the Second Law was "You can't evolve"?

Obligatory Simpsons quote: Lisa! In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

I intend to become an immortal divinity, and thus do not feel the need to worry about this whole thermodynamics thing.

I believe in magic. I don' need no steenkin' laws!

To me, the second law is what really makes thermodynamics a science of its own. The first law is a conservation law, which is also found in classical and quantum mechanics. There is, of course, the key physical idea of heat being a form of energy, but that really only means that the first law is half-distinct.

The zeroth law doesn't provide a quantitative definition of temperature, just a statement that whatever temperature might be, if there is no net heat flow between two objects then they are at the same temperature.

It's the second law that really makes thermodynamics its own science, with implications that go from engines to microscopic processes to information theory and beyond.

Although it tells you very little about thermodynamics, the Zeroth law tells you something about the HISTORY of science and the PROCESS of science, which is why I like spending a good part of class every year talking about it. Questioning what it means to make a "measurement" is never a bad thing.

When I taught intro physics we had a three term sequence with mechanics the first term, waves and thermo the second, and E&M the third. The second law came at the end of the term, and I never felt I did it justice. This is one of the most important laws of physics and we are going to cover it one lecture.

Thermo is a science unto itself. First law is that energy is conserved, got that. Second law is the law of large numbers, for many particles, the central limit says you get a gaussian with width rootN, so for large enough N that which is most likely to happen REALLY is most likely to happen.

So as thermo, I think its engineering

I used to use the Second Law as my email signature. Teenagers tend to be nihilistic as a whole, but I think reminding people in scientific terms that the universe is doomed to eventually heat death in every correspondence took it to a higher level.

In college, I'd weed out dates as potential mates with the question: "Which do you think is more interesting: thermodynamics or quantum mechanics?"

The right answer was thermo. I'm romantically incompatible with people who answer quantum. And there are the ones who just run away after I ask such a nerdy question. Definitely not my type at all.

The second law.
I mean c'mon. It states mathematically that we are all eventually doomed. How cool is that? :)

The Wick rotation, Stephen Hawking, John Baez Law:

http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2007/02/quantization_and_cohomology…

"For now Iâll just drop this hint: temperature lives on the Riemann sphere. (In the quoted text I was trying to treat temperature as imaginary reciprocal time, via the similarity between exp(âitH/â) and exp(âH/kT). Right now Iâm trying to treat temperature as an imaginary Planckâs constant. Both ideas are fruitful and widely used in physics â but the second is far more relevant to this course.)"

Huh. I've never heard Nernst's theorem referred to as the 3rd Law of Thermodynamics before. Something new every day, I suppose.