Ian Ford
ISBN: 978-1-1199-7530-4
Wiley, published 2013
This book emerged from a lecture course I have given to second year undergraduates in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, UCL.
I offer a pedagogical approach to statistical mechanics and thermodynamics that gives prominence to irreversible processes and entropy generation, and attempts to provide some answers to the basic question: 'What is entropy?'
The book cover expresses some of these answers: entropy is uncertainty, a measure of our lack of microscopic information about the world, represented by the mist that obscures our view. The growth of such uncertainty with time, on the road ahead as it were, is natural in view of the complicated and incompletely defined rules of dynamics that prevail, as well as our uncertainty in the initial conditions. Yet the increase in overall microscopic uncertainty can be accompanied by constructive changes in the world, and not just those of decline and decay. The second law of thermodynamics is associated with disorderly and uncertain behaviour at the microscale. My message is: entropy is not simply 'disorder'.
