🚀 go-pugleaf

Pentcho Valev wrote on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:01:52 -0800:

> Open Letter to: Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society
> 
> Copy to: Professor John Pethica, Physical Secretary and Vice- President,
> Professor Sir Michael Berry, Sir Peter Williams CBE, Treasurer and
> Vice-President, Professor Lorna Casselton, Foreign Secretary and
> Vice-President
> 
> Dear Dr. Rees,
> 
> Classical thermodynamics has been dead for a long time so when in 2001 a
> respected scientist, Jos Uffink, declared that a version of the second
> law of thermodynamics ("Entropy always increases") is a RED HERRING,
> this sounded like an epitaph officially putting an end to any further
> discussion:
> 
> http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/ Jos Uffink: "The
> historian of science and mathematician Truesdell made a detailed study
> of the historical development of thermodynamics in the period 1822-1854.
> He characterises the theory, even in its present state, as 'a dismal
> swamp of obscurity' and 'a prime example to show that physicists are not
> exempt from the madness of crowds'. He is outright cynical about the
> respect with which nonmathematicians treat the Second Law: "Clausius
> verbal statement of the second law makes no sense [. . . ]. All that
> remains is a Mosaic prohibition; a century of philosophers and
> journalists have acclaimed this commandment; a century of mathematicians
> have shuddered and averted their eyes from the unclean. Seven times in
> the past thirty years have I tried to follow the argument Clausius
> offers [. . . ] and seven times has it blanked and gravelled me. [. . .
> ] I cannot explain what I cannot understand." From this anthology it
> emerges that although many prominent physicists are firmly convinced of,
> and express admiration for the Second Law, there are also serious
> complaints, especially from mathematicians, about a lack of clarity and
> rigour in its formulation. At the very least one can say that the Second
> Law suffers from an image problem: its alleged eminence and venerability
> is not perceived by everyone who has been exposed to it. What is it that
> makes this physical law so obstreperous that every attempt at a clear
> formulation seems to have failed? Is it just the usual sloppiness of
> physicists? Or is there a deeper problem? And what exactly is the
> connection with the arrow of time and irreversibility? Could it be that
> this is also just based on bluff? Perhaps readers will shrug their
> shoulders over these questions. Thermodynamics is obsolete; for a better
> understanding of the problem we should turn to more recent, statistical
> theories. But even then the questions we are about to study have more
> than a purely historical importance. The problem of reproducing the
> Second Law, perhaps in an adapted version, remains one of the toughest,
> and controversial problems in statistical physics.....This summary leads
> to the question whether it is fruitful to see irreversibility or
> time-asymmetry as the essence of the second law. Is it not more
> straightforward, in view of the unargued statements of Kelvin, the bold
> claims of Clausius and the strained attempts of Planck, to give up this
> idea? I believe that Ehrenfest- Afanassjewa was right in her verdict
> that the discussion about the arrow of time as expressed in the second
> law of the thermodynamics is actually a RED HERRING."

Jos Uffink is plaing wrong. Of course, what neither he or you say is that
Truesdell is the father of a formulation of generalized thermodynamics,
which is built over the second law of thermodynamics (d_iS >= 0) and which
gives predicts exatly the same classical phenomena that the clasical
formulation given by Clausius, Kelving and Karatheodory...

(...)


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