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Books > History > World history > 1750 to 1900
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Entropic Creation - Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology (Paperback)
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Entropic Creation - Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology (Paperback)
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Entropic Creation is the first English-language book to consider
the cultural and religious responses to the second law of
thermodynamics, from around 1860 to 1920. According to the second
law of thermodynamics, as formulated by the German physicist Rudolf
Clausius, the entropy of any closed system will inevitably increase
in time, meaning that the system will decay and eventually end in a
dead state of equilibrium. Application of the law to the entire
universe, first proposed in the 1850s, led to the prediction of a
future 'heat death', where all life has ceased and all organization
dissolved. In the late 1860s it was pointed out that, as a
consequence of the heat death scenario, the universe can have
existed only for a finite period of time. According to the
'entropic creation argument', thermodynamics warrants the
conclusion that the world once begun or was created. It is these
two scenarios, allegedly consequences of the science of
thermodynamics, which form the core of this book. The heat death
and the claim of cosmic creation were widely discussed in the
period 1870 to 1920, with participants in the debate including
European scientists, intellectuals and social critics, among them
the physicist William Thomson and the communist thinker Friedrich
Engels. One reason for the passion of the debate was that some
authors used the law of entropy increase to argue for a divine
creation of the world. Consequently, the second law of
thermodynamics became highly controversial. In Germany in
particular, materialists and positivists engaged in battle with
Christian - mostly Catholic - scholars over the cosmological
consequences of thermodynamics. This heated debate, which is today
largely forgotten, is reconstructed and examined in detail in this
book, bringing into focus key themes on the interactions between
cosmology, physics, religion and ideology, and the public way in
which these topics were discussed in the latter half of the
nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth century.
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