![]() The word itself combines the Greek terms for heat and force, but its application now extends way beyond machinery to include biological processes, quantum mechanics and information processing.Īll fridges, including Einstein’s, are governed by the laws of thermodynamics, which rest on the distinction between heat and temperature. The study of thermodynamics began in the 17th century with attempts to create a vacuum inside a glass globe – the subject of Joseph Wright’s famous picture An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) – but it wasn’t established as a science until the Victorian era, when Scottish physicists drew on French research to improve the efficiency of the massive steam engines driving industrialisation. In Einstein’s Fridge, Paul Sen exhorts us to study thermodynamics so that we might make better-informed decisions about how to save the world. This year, it has been kept at that setting as a ‘Covid wake-up call’, but the chief apocalyptic risks are still nuclear destruction and climate change. In 1990, when the existence of global warming was routinely contested, a Nasa scientist spoke frankly on television: ‘It’s easier to get funding if you can show evidence of impending human disasters … Science benefits from scary scenarios.’ Last year, the Doomsday Clock was set to a hundred seconds before midnight, indicating that man-made global apocalypse is closer than at any point since the clock was created in 1947. ![]()
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