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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.
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.
The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the discovery of
cosmic acceleration due to dark energy, a discovery that is all the
more perplexing as nobody knows what dark energy actually is. We
put the modern concept of cosmological vacuum energy into
historical context and show how it grew out of disparate roots in
quantum mechanics (zero-point energy) and relativity theory (the
cosmological constant, Einstein's "greatest blunder"). These two
influences have remained strangely aloof and still co-exist in an
uneasy alliance that is at the heart of the greatest crisis in
theoretical physics, the cosmological-constant problem.
This book introduces the methodological and philosophical problems
with which modern history of science is concerned, offering a
comprehensive and critical review through description and
evaluation of significant historiographical viewpoints.
Incorporating discussion of key problems in general historical
writing, with examples drawn from a range of disciplines, this
non-elementary introduction bridges the gap between general history
and history of science. Following a review of the early development
of the history of science, the theory of history as applied to
science history is introduced, examining the basic problems which
this generates, including problems of periodisation, ideological
functions, and the conflict between diachronical and anachronical
historiography. Finally, the book considers the critical use, and
analysis, of historical sources, and the possibility of the
experiemental reconstruction of history. Aimed primarily at
students, the book's broad scope and integration of historical,
philosophical and scientific matters will interest philosophers,
sociologists and general historians, for whom there is no
alternative introduction to the subject at this level.
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