Overview

Until the middle of the nineteenth century entropy and energy were confused with one another. The intellectual fog slowly cleared and now these words name subtle and powerful concepts. Most people think they know what energy is, but few could define entropy. This Very Short Introduction traces the emergence of entropy and energy as distinct concepts, and explains how entropy spread from thermodynamics into statistical mechanics, probability theory and data science. It explains the implications of entropy for heat pumps, solar cells, carbon capture, and liquified natural gas. Quantum mechanics and gravity open new horizons for entropy, and when combined in the quantum theory of black holes, they call into question our current understanding of material reality.

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James Binney is an astrophysicist at Oxford University. He is the coauthor of The Physics of Quantum Mechanics (2013) with David Skinner, along with Astrophysics: A Very Short Introduction. Brian Troxell is a SAG-AFTRA voice-actor and an actor-actor. He's an owner-producer-director-actor at Sketchworks Comedy, Atlanta's longest running sketch comedy company, and he's also the anchor of their weekly NewsBrake program, which streams on Sketchworks' social media pages. He's performed 200 audiobooks across every genre you can imagine (except porn), and he narrated Audible.com's daily Wall Street Journal Morning Read under the name Alexander Quincy from 2015 until it was unceremoniously cancelled at the end of November 2021. Brian is represented by AMT and can be seen in Hawkeye and the fourth and sixth seasons of Cobra Kai, among other places. He lives in Kennesaw with his two cats, Winston and Malachi.

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