Masters of Thermodynamics

One Internet, multiple worlds.  People have gone mobile, but iMechanica has not.  Although iMechanica is accessible from mobile phones, but it was not designed as such.  On the other hand, mobile social networks are good mostly for short forms.  A practical solution seems to be posting on iMechanica and linking the entries to social networks, such as twitter, wechat, and Facebook.  For example, The New Yorker has a strong presence on Facebook, as my sons and their friends would say.   

In the last few months, I have been experimenting with wechat, a mobile social network extremely popular in China.  But only tiny fraction of non-Chinese use wechat.  

Since my son Michael joined Facebook last year, I also started to experiment with Facebook.  Like many people, I have had a Facebook account for a long time, but had seldom used it.  I did link my Facebook account to my iMechanica account, so that all my iMechanica posts appear automatically on Facebook.  But Facebook is unavailable in China.

The Internet are fragmented by people, governments, and technologies.  Here are my accounts.  twitter. wechat:  zhigangsuo.  Facebook.   

Here are two entries I posted on wechat on 26 December 2015.  I hope to keep posting on the readings of the Masters of Thermodynamics, and hope to discuss with you on iMechanica or any of the mobile social networks.

Teaching thermodynamics to undergraduate students has once again renewed my interest in thermodynamics. I am now particularly intrigued by the history of packaging various ingredients into a course on thermodynamics. How does each ingredient get in?  Why?  Last semester I reread Carnot, Maxwell, and Fermi. For the trip to Princeton I have brought along Planck. It has been a great fun to watch great people struggle with a great subject. At some point I'd like to finish reading Gibbs. Here is a New Year's resolution.

Fermi's thermodynamics is a short book, about 150 pages. Perhaps only the first 4 chapters are worth reading. There you get a concise, yet patient, treatment of classical thermodynamics: state of equilibrium (chapter 1), energy (chapter 2), and entropy (chapters 3 and 4). All within 70 pages or so, plus some simple exercises. After that, the great man seemed to have lost patience. A quick succession of applied topics:  potentials (chapter 5), reaction (chapter 6), and dilute solution (chapter 7). The treatment is more like quick notes taken from Planck's book. You will do much, much better with Planck on these topics. Fermi's last chapter, the third law, is good. Here the pace is fast. He quotes several results from statistical mechanics to illustrate the absolute entropy. The chapter gives you an introduction, but is too impatient to be an independent textbook. But again, the short book is a delight to read.  Even where he failed to deliver the point, you forgive him for not belaboring his failure. He moved on.

Planck’s book is freely available at Google Books.