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Entropy Demystified: The Second Law Reduced to Plain Common Sense | 
| Author: Arieh Ben-naim
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 2092398
Media: Paperback
Edition: Expanded
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 250
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 0.5
ISBN: 9812832254
Dewey Decimal Number: 541
EAN: 9789812832252
ASIN: 9812832254
Publication Date: May 31, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New. Delivery is usually 5 - 8 working days from order, International is by Royal Mail Airmail
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Basic February 21, 2008
23 out of 25 found this review helpful
After seeing nothing but five-star reviews for this book, I figured I'd pick it up despite having little feel for what its target audience was since none of it was actually viewable on Amazon.
In a nutshell, this is very much a book for laymen. If you want an intuitive grasp of what entropy's about in the context of everyday physics without getting bogged down in math, then this may be a great book for you. The book uses as little math as possible in its explanations, and effectively assumes you're unfamiliar with or have forgotten high-school-level math operations such as factorials and logarithms. It manages to pound its point home reasonably well using lots and lots of fairly simple thought experiments that only differ from each other by little incremental steps.
On the other hand, if you already know anything at all about the information-theoretic formulation of entropy, already have an appreciation for the Law of Large Numbers, and have heard the words "macrostates" and "microstates" before, then there's nothing in this book you aren't likely to understand already. If you've taken a course on statistical mechanics and finished it without being horrendously confused, but maybe were hoping for a useful refresher on how different formulations of entropy are related, you should pass on this book. If you were hoping for illumination about the aspects of entropy that are actually at all "interesting" to modern physicists, such as black hole entropy (or the bizarre theories it's spawned such as the holographic principle), this is definitely not the book you're looking for.
Also, the book has no index. This is less annoying than it would be in a book that had more meat to it, but still, any 200+ page nonfiction book with no index should be taken out and shot as a matter of principle.
A Thought-Provoking Introduction for Nonscientists February 13, 2008
No matter what your background, there is promise in a book that contains "An Introduction to Probability Theory, Information Theory, and All the Rest." And Arieh Ben-Naim delivers.
Call something The Second Law of Thermodynamics and it's bound to have a forbidding quality. Partly this is due to the use of the word "Law", and partly it's because scientists have been challenged by the Second Law since it was first formulated 150 years ago. But despite this quality even the nonscientist needs a passing familiarity with the law's basic principles to understand some of nature's greatest puzzlements: Why do whole eggs break and broken eggs never again become whole? Why does a drop of red food coloring loosed in a bowl of water always disperse but the dye in a pool of pink water never coalesces to form an isolated spot of pure red? And why do teenagers' rooms only get messier? Ben-Naim can't help you with the deepest of these mysteries -- you just have to accept the room situation -- but he does shed considerable light on the hows and whys of the Second Law and on the scientific debates that have long surrounded it.
Understanding the Second Law means understanding entropy and the counterintuitive rule that, left alone, the entropy in a system always increases. Counterintuitive because what else in the universe always increases? In a clearly argued presentation, Ben-Naim makes the case that entropy is best thought of as information and that rather than some of the more typical expressions (e.g., an untended system always leads to greater disorder), what actually increases in a system left to itself is the amount of information needed to fully and correctly describe the whereabouts and behavior of the particles atoms and molecules therein.
It would be silly for a layperson to say much more about what is obviously a nuanced subject, and Ben-Naim plainly states that the nature of entropy has produced diametrically opposing opinions even among Nobel Prize winning physicists. But Ben-Naim does nonetheless provide even the lay reader with invaluable tools for better appreciating aspects of the Second Law. Among these tools are discussions and illustrations of the truly BIG numbers involved in the workings of the Second Law -- numbers so big that without scientific shorthand they could not be written in their entirety in all the time available since time began (numbers of the 1,000,000,000,000,000,... variety).
When the effects of probability are then unleashed in the realm of such big numbers, Ben-Naim shows how big systems "always" stabilize around their most probable states (red dye diffusing to pink in a pool of water) and how rare will be the exceptions: Turn ten thousand coins all to show "heads" then give the whole lot a random toss. While it is possible that all ten thousand will fall so that each coin again shows heads, don't bet on it. The chance is so low, says Ben-Naim, that you probably wouldn't get them to show that one unique result even if you could flip the coins at the rate of a million times a second and were able to do this for the entire 15 billion years the universe has existed. Instead, what you're almost always likely to get is close to half the coins showing heads and close to half showing tails. Which, says Ben-Naim, is why the randomly moving molecules of red dye will "always" spread evenly throughout the pool and "never" again come together in their original single drop. And why -- because it takes more information to describe the location of the particles in the dispersed rather than the concentrated dye -- the entropy of the red-diffused-to-pink system has increased.
This coupling of clear explanation and vivid example goes a long way toward making the concepts Ben-Naim presents accessible. And while the lay reader is not apt to come away with a thorough understanding of why "the Boltzmann constant (k) should be expunged from the vocabulary of physics," he or she will undoubtedly gain a deeper insight into the way the world around us works and why we see it the way we do. And which is why everyone can benefit from this book.
Enjoy the dice game to familiarize yourself with the second law February 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Arieh Ben-Naim, a distinguished scientist from the field of solution physical chemistry, guides readers to grasp basic principles of the second law of thermodynamics. In the book the author provides clear examples of how widely prevailed use of 'increase in disorder' to explain the underlying microscopic mechanism of the second law can be subjective and misleading. The statements made in this regard are reinforced by his decades of incomparable contribution to the understanding of hydrophobicity. One may recognize longstanding controversial aspects in the interpretation of the second law from the author's conclusion of the necessity of changing the unit of the absolute temperature. The book is written in a lucid manner, which can be done only by individuals who understand the essence of the subject in depth. It is telling we may need to go back at least once to the simplest question after having worked on the every possible detail. Thorough repetition of examples as introduced in the book may be a necessary attitude to tackle on any most difficult subject. The book is recommended not only to readers in fundamental physics and chemistry but to ones in biologically related science.
Entropy - no big deal November 7, 2007
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
"... Arieh Ben-Naim invites the reader to experience the joy of appreciating something which has eluded understanding for many years -entropy and the second law of thermodynamics". This statement on the back cover for sure will reflect the experience of many who read this book. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand or teach the mysterious concept "entropy". Just sit back, open this delightful book, and experience how your foggy ideas are cleared up within just a couple of enjoyable hours. You need no prior knowledge; if you have learned how to read and how to count numbers between one and ten you possess all qualifications needed to read and appreciate all of its contents. The author not only succeeds to brilliantly explain the meaning of entropy, its statistical interpretation and why common sense leads us to conclude entropy (most likely) is ever-increasing - he moreover provides compelling arguments to do away with the second law altogether: ".. because science will find it unnecessary to formulate a law of physics based on purely logical deduction". This concluding sentence by Ben-Naim will be further substantiated in a forthcoming book by the same author. In addition to the present book, which I highly recommend to everbody who wants to learn about entropy in general, I also want to recommend another recent book by Ben-Naim on molecular theory of solutions to students and scientists interested in the entropy of solvation processes. The scientific literature on this topic is huge and -above all - utterly confusing. Ben-Naim's clearly formulated ideas have helped me a lot in understanding the subject better.
Entropy Defuzzyfied October 16, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" leads many people to think, that markets have the power to repair "themselves". But even in markets as open systems, there are irreversible processes, as the openness of real systems always is limited. Adam Smith, still in a Newtonian world, didn't know anything about the "second 'law' of thermodynamics" and "entropy". But at least today we should know better. Unfortunately entropy still seems to be some mystic thing to many, which to deal with should be avoided. (Knowing about entropy also increases responsibility. Some like to avoid that as well.)
You can't "avoid" entropy. Entropy is something very real: E.g. in broadband transmission the cost (e.g. chip size, power dissipation, heat generation) of managing entropy is almost proportional to the amount of entropy, which is to be managed. And climate change also can be explained by the entropy accounting (entropy generation, import, export) of the biosphere and the clogging of the interfaces of the biosphere, which are required to get rid of the entropy generated within the biosphere.
Therefore we need comprehensible explanations for entropy. My personal interest is not so much in entropy itself, but in how teachers and authors manage to explain entropy. Arieh Ben-Naim manages to get rid of all the fuzz which comes with so many publications related to entropy. He really manages to demystify entropy. I think, there are two paths which one could select to explain entropy. One is within information processing, the other one uses statistical physics. Ben-Naim chose the second one and thus not only managed to demystify entropy, but also demystified statistical physics: From my point of view, you just need a high school degree in order to be able to comprehend his book. Or you even may be lucky to have a teacher, who uses this book in the final high school year.
Economists and social scientists could get some help from the book too in understanding, what entropy really means. Indicators like the inequality measures of Theil and Kolm are entropy measures. And Nicholas Georgescu Roegen will be easier to understand. (The book would have been helpful to him too.)
Besides its content, I also like the making of the little book from Arieh Ben-Naim. It got very nice illustrations. And they are not just nice, they also are helpful. Here scientific thinking comes together with simple love to make things beautiful. It seems, that good science also leads to good aesthetics.
Related to this book, I also recommend the publications of M.V.Volkenstein (like Physics and Biology), although they are mostly out of print.
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