Understanding Thermodynamics

Why does coffee go cold, why does time only move forward, and how can a steam engine from 1712 still tell us how the universe ends?

Understanding Thermodynamics is a clear, story-driven guide to energy, entropy and the laws of physics that quietly govern engines, chemistry, living cells, stars and black holes. No equations to wade through. No physics degree required.

It begins in an English coal mine, where engineers were building powerful machines before anyone understood heat.

From there you'll meet the people who worked it out: a cannon-boring adventurer who boiled water with friction, a brewer who measured temperature to a hundredth of a degree, and a young French engineer whose mistaken theory still produced a result that holds today. You'll also meet a physicist whose equation was carved on his headstone only after his death.

Inside, you'll discover:

• What energy actually is, and why four people in four countries found the same law at once
• Why heat only flows one way, and what that has to do with the arrow of time
• Why entropy is not "disorder" but the arithmetic of ways something can be arranged
• How Maxwell's demon forced physicists to treat information as a physical thing
• Why absolute zero can be approached but never reached
• Why every engine, power plant and refrigerator hits a ceiling it cannot cross
• How life builds order without breaking the Second Law
• What the heat death of the universe means, and how cosmology has changed the picture
• Why black holes have temperature, and what that reveals about gravity, information and space itself