Time and Thermodynamics, Facts Of File

Library of Congress Cataloging | English | ISBN-978-0-8160-6113-6 | Jun-2007 | PDF | 6.25 MB | 161 pages | RAR Compressed - 2.92 MB | No Password

Introduction
A LEGEND OF the ancient Greeks tells the story of a god called Prometheus, who taught people how to make fire. This gave a tremendous boost to humanity, and the other gods were furious with Prometheus for allowing humans to wield such potency. Although the story of Prometheus is a myth, the ability to harness fire and heat did provide people with some of their earliest technology. Steam powered much of the Industrial Revolution, a period of time beginning in the late 18th century in which machines tremendously advanced the productivity of manufacturing and transportation. But heat, temperature, and their relationships are much broader subjects than just steam-powered machines. Warmth is associated with life and activity; cold is associated with death and stillness. Some organisms rely on the environment to provide warmth, and some organisms can generate their own, but all living beings must adapt and interact in a world in which temperature is not constant. Time and Thermodynamics explores the physics of heat and temperature and their effects on people’s lives and technology. The word thermo refers to heat, and the word dynamics gives an indication of motion, both of which are vital to the subject. Heat is energy that flows from warm objects to cooler ones. Nineteenthcentury scientists and engineers such as Sadi Carnot, primarily motivated by the desire to understand and improve steam-powered machines, discovered the principles of thermodynamics. Much to their surprise, they found that the physics of thermodynamics places strict limits on what machines can accomplish. But the subject also opened up vast areas of knowledge in habitats, biology, technology, engines, as well as a surprising amount of revelation on the topic of time. Time and Thermodynamics discusses thermodynamics principles related to each of these topics and how their application enables people to better understand the world and sometimes even improve it. Temperature is vital to the health and welfare of all animals, and Earth’s temperature varies considerably from place to place. Early humans could only live in warm areas such as the tropics, near the equator. Although modern humans have the technology to keep their houses and offices warm even in cold environments, the growth and development of civilization has created unintentional effects. Cities are warmer than their surrounding regions, and on a global scale, Earth is experiencing rising temperatures. Thermodynamics offers an important tool to study these effects. Maintaining proper temperature is critical for life, and this need has a great influence on the form, function, and molecules of the bodies and organs of people and animals. Reptiles bask in the sun for warmth, but humans generate a lot of heat on their own. These two methods of keeping warm differ in significant ways, yet both adhere to thermodynamic principles of heat generation and transfer. Heat naturally flows from warm to cold objects, but it is often desirable to get it to go in the opposite direction. Air conditioners pump
heat from the inside of a relatively cool house to the hot environment outside on a summer day. The process requires energy, usually taken from electricity, and the reason why strikes at the heart of the laws of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics laws also put strict limits on the ability of engines to use heat to propel vehicles or raise heavy objects. Knowing these limits prevents engineers from trying to design impossible machines, but it does not stop them from building impressive cars capable of roaring down a racetrack at 200 miles per hour (320 km/hr.), jet fighters that exceed the speed of sound by a factor of two or three, and a new engine called a ramjet to accelerate an aircraft up to 7,000 miles per hour (11,200 km/hr.). The final chapter explores time. Although time would not seem at first to have strong ties with thermodynamics, the relationship is profound. Physics has much symmetry—the laws of physics are often the same in a variety of circumstances. This includes time; physics formulas are
usually the same whether time is increasing (going forward, into the future) or decreasing (going backward, into the past). Most of physics has no preference for either case, because its laws work equally well in both directions. Yet people experience time as flowing in a single direction, from past to present and on into the future. Thermodynamics provides an ingenious explanation for this, because its laws are an exception to the rest of physics and breaks the symmetry in time. As a result, thermodynamics yields clues about the nature of time, the possibility of time travel, and the very beginning of time, at the creation of the universe.

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