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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: A beautiful book that explains thermodynamics clearly for the layman. I also purchased the author's other book "Taming the atom" which was yet another masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: A beautiful book that explains thermodynamics clearly for the layman. I also purchased the author's other book "Taming the atom" which was yet another masterpiece.
Rating: 
Summary: Missing equations
Review: An interesting book giving a historical overview.
I have to warn the interested people that the book
is lacking equations.
The only one I found was e=mc*c
If the reader has a rudimentary understanding of mathematics
than (s)he will miss the equations.
Rating: 
Summary: Highly informative,readable,and exciting.
Review: Here is a very fine and accesible history of thermodinamics that not only keeps the reader interested and excited to he last page,but it is also thought provoking,spurring readers into more advanced reading on the subject.Highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: Where scientific knowledge starts to collapse
Review: Ok, so science is more fun when you leave school than it is when you are there. That's because there are books like this (previously published under the more appropriate title of Maxwells Demon). This is a book on the history of heat - I could never imagine anyone writing a book like that - which one would actually finish and not condemn to the bonfire (more heat!). But this is an interesting and informative account where you will meet all the names from your physics lessons, Carnot, Kelvin. Maxwell, Faraday, Ampere. It is important to read this book if you want to understand the world of quantum mechanics. This is the starting point - the point where it all started to go wrong for physics - in the form of Maxwells demon, black body radiation and the double slit experiment. Up to this point Science made sense - now we all know it was a sham and science no longer makes sense - if you want to know why start here!
Rating:
Summary: On the Trail of a Demonic Idea
Review: This is an enjoyable history of thermodynamics. Maxwell's Demon does not actually come into it until about half-way through, and then becomes, gradually, the focus. Von Baeyer's approach is to advance his topic short chapter by short chapter. Each chapter treats the work of a man (alas, in science women have not, until recently, played much of a part) as it relates to the growing knowledge of the first and second laws of thermodynamics. The ideas, the experiments, the intellectual milieu, and the subject's life are all fair game in these little essays, and all are treated in a clear, serious, but still light-hearted way. The writing is very pleasing, the author's humane, humorous and cultured personality shines through.The point of the book, of course, is to explore the Second Law of Thermodynamics, using the Demon invented by the physicist Maxwell. It has proved a remarkably troublesome sprite in spite of all the attempts to exorcise it over the years. Here you will learn some thermodynamics and some history, and when you are done you will have a general idea of the issues swirling around the notion of entropy. After reading this book, you very well might want to get your feet wet in an introductory text on thermodynamics, now that you know some of the issues in play. Or, if you already know some, this will fill in the human background, and may alert you to some current thinking. One of the current issues is the relationship between the entropy from Information Theory and the entropy from Thermodynamics. As various folks keep trying to conflate them, our author reports on it. The discussion is detailed enough to actually convey some of the ideas that trouble modern researchers, and tantalizing enough to make the reader want to know even more. What else could one want from a popular book on the subject?
Rating:
Summary: Physical chemistry is not the nightmare it once was.
Review: This is the best book about thermodynamics I have ever read ! In my opinion, it makes more to the understanding of this difficult and so misundertood discipline than any other "theoretical" book. Reading this is a funny and pleasant experience! It's like an adventure book, as it relives the history of the men who built the discipline of thermodynamics, and the curious and interesting circustances that brought them to their discoveries. some of that men and their histories I have never heard about!! Congratulations to Von Baeyer, who has done an outstanding and incredible job!!
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