わかるエントロピー Entropy Demystified: the Second Law Reduced to Plain Common Sense

Ben-naim, Arieh

World Scientific Publishing Co Pte Ltd（2007/05発売）

• 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版／ページ数 248 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9789812700551
• DDC分類 536.7

基本説明

Written in an accessible style, the book guides the reader through an abundance of dice games and examples from everyday life.

Full Description

In this unique book, Arieh Ben-Naim invites the reader to experience the joy of appreciating something which has eluded understanding for many years — entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.The book has a two-pronged message: first, that the Second Law is not "infinitely incomprehensible" as commonly stated in textbooks of thermodynamics but can, in fact, be comprehended through sheer common sense; and second, that entropy is not a mysterious quantity that has "resisted understanding" but a simple, familiar and easily comprehensible concept.Written in an accessible style, the book guides the reader through an abundance of dice games and examples from everyday life. The author paves the way for readers to discover for themselves what entropy is, how it changes, and most importantly, why it always changes in one direction in a spontaneous process.

Contents

Introduction and a Brief History of the Second Law of Thermodynamics; A Brief Introduction to Probability Theory, Information Theory and All the Rest; Let Us Play First with Real Dice; Next, Let's Play with Simplified Dice and Have a Preliminary Grasp of the Second Law; Experience the Second Law with All Your Five Senses; Finally, Grasp It with Your Common Sense; Translating from the Dice-World to the Real World; Reflections on the Status of the Second Law of Thermodynamics as a Law of Physics.