Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction
    The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction
    The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction
    Audiobook3 hours

    The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction

    Written by Peter Atkins

    Narrated by Nick Sullivan

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The laws of thermodynamics drive everything that happens in the universe. From the sudden expansion of a cloud of gas to the cooling of hot metal-everything is moved or restrained by four simple laws. Written by Peter Atkins, one of the world's leading authorities on thermodynamics, this powerful and compact introduction explains what these four laws are and how they work, using accessible language and virtually no mathematics. Guiding the listener a step at a time, Atkins begins with Zeroth (so named because the first two laws were well established before scientists realized that a third law, relating to temperature, should precede them-hence the jocular name zeroth), and proceeds through the First, Second, and Third Laws, offering a clear account of concepts such as the availability of work and the conservation of energy. Atkins ranges from the fascinating theory of entropy (revealing how its unstoppable rise constitutes the engine of the universe), through the concept of free energy, and to the brink, and then beyond the brink, of absolute zero.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJun 22, 2021
    ISBN9781666142006
    The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction

    Related to The Laws of Thermodynamics

    Related audiobooks

    Mechanical Engineering For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      How Black Holes Nearly Ruined Time

      Apr 11, 2019

      This essay is one of the five winners in the 2019 writing competition held by the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University. “The Black Hole Initiative offers a unique environment for thinking about the topic of black holes more creatively and comp

      6 min read

    • Article

      How Black Holes Nearly Ruined Time

      Jan 24, 2019

      An Introduction to the Black Hole Institute Fittingly, the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) was founded 100 years after Karl Schwarzschild solved Einstein’s equations for general relativity—a solution that described a black hole decades before the first a

      6 min read

    • Article

      Time Flows Toward Order

      Dec 2, 2020

      The one law of physics that virtually all scientists believe will never be found to be wrong is the second law of thermodynamics. Despite this exalted status, it has long been associated with a great mystery and a bleak implication. The mystery is th

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Idea of Entropy Has Led Us Astray

      Jul 1, 2020

      Last summer, in the early days of a heat wave that would culminate in the highest temperatures ever recorded in Paris, I biked across the city to meet my friend Romain Graziani. At a sidewalk café, we sipped burnt espresso and watched the air shimmer

      9 min read

    • Article

      Infinite Energy

      Apr 19, 2021

      Infinite Energy
      11 min read

    • Article

      Schrödinger’s Cat When Nobody Is Looking

      Aug 26, 2020

      Some of the most perplexing topics in physics revolve around quantum theory. The quandary is seen most famously in the Schrödinger’s cat question and the issue of information loss in black hole evaporation. Richard Feynman said, “I think that I can s

      13 min read

    • Article

      The Joy of Condensed Matter: Hard times in fundamental physics got you down? Let’s talk excitons.

      Dec 31, 2021

      Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Wonder” issue in February, 2021. Everyone seems to be talking about the problems with physics: Peter Woit’s book Not

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Crisis of the Multiverse: In An Infinite Multiverse, Physics Loses Its Ability To Make Predictions.

      Jun 8, 2017

      Physicists have always hoped that once we understood the fundamental laws of physics, they would make unambiguous predictions for physical quantities. We imagined that the underlying physical laws would explain why the mass of the Higgs particle must

      13 min read

    • Article

      Before There Were Stars: The unlikely heroes that made starlight possible.

      Feb 27, 2014

      The universe is the grandest merger story that there is. Complete with mysterious origins, forces of light and darkness, and chemistry complex enough to make the chemical conglomerate BASF blush, the trip from the first moments after the Big Bang to

      6 min read

    • Article

      Before There Were Stars

      Dec 26, 2019

      The universe is the grandest merger story that there is. Complete with mysterious origins, forces of light and darkness, and chemistry complex enough to make the chemical conglomerate BASF blush, the trip from the first moments after the Big Bang to

      6 min read

    • Article

      Before There Were Stars: The unlikely heroes that made starlight possible.

      Feb 27, 2014

      The universe is the grandest merger story that there is. Complete with mysterious origins, forces of light and darkness, and chemistry complex enough to make the chemical conglomerate BASF blush, the trip from the first moments after the Big Bang to

      6 min read

    • Article

      Before There Were Stars: The unlikely heroes that made starlight possible.

      Mar 12, 2015

      The universe is the grandest merger story that there is. Complete with mysterious origins, forces of light and darkness, and chemistry complex enough to make the chemical conglomerate BASF blush, the trip from the first moments after the Big Bang to

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Joy of Condensed Matter

      Feb 24, 2021

      Everyone seems to be talking about the problems with physics: Peter Woit’s book Not Even Wrong, Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics, and Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math leap to mind, and they have started a wider conversation. But is all of phys

      7 min read

    • Article

      How Physics Is Like Three-Chord Rock: Like a set of common chords, the same math appears in diverse fields of physics.

      Jun 12, 2014

      A few years back, 12 million of us clicked over to watch the “Pachelbel Rant” on YouTube. You might remember it. Strumming repetitive chords on his guitar, comedian Rob Paravonian confessed that when he was a cellist, he couldn’t stand the Pachelbel

      6 min read

    • Article

      Our Little Life Is Rounded with Possibility

      Jun 9, 2021

      If you could soar high in the sky, as red kites often do in search of prey, and look down at the domain of all things known and yet to be known, you would see something very curious: a vast class of things that science has so far almost entirely negl

      10 min read

    • Article

      Our Little Life Is Rounded with Possibility: Science expressed only in terms of what happens is getting in the way of progress.

      Dec 31, 2021

      Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Hidden Truths” issue in June, 2021. If you could soar high in the sky, as red kites often do in search of prey, and l

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Mystery of Time’s Arrow: Past and future may not be what they seem.

      Jan 30, 2014

      As conscious beings, we are constantly aware of the relentless march of time. You can make an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet back into an egg. Dropped glasses shatter and do not reassemble themselves. Above all, we age and become de

      9 min read

    • Article

      How Big Can Schrödinger’s Kittens Get?: Scientists are slowly scaling up quantum effects from atomic to human size.

      Oct 8, 2015

      It’s time we thought again about quantum theory. There’s nothing actually wrong with the theory itself—it works fantastically well for understanding how atoms and subatomic particles behave. The problem is how we talk about quantum theory. We keep in

      13 min read

    • Article

      The Mystery of Time’s Arrow

      Apr 4, 2019

      As conscious beings, we are constantly aware of the relentless march of time. You can make an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet back into an egg. Dropped glasses shatter and do not reassemble themselves. Above all, we age and become de

      9 min read

    • Article

      Why The Flow Of Time Is An Illusion

      Apr 25, 2019

      In his book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Max Tegmark writes that “time is not an illusion, but the flow of time is.” In this month’s issue of Nautilus, which looks at the concept of flow through various port

      6 min read

    • Article

      Is The Law Of Conservation Of Energy Cancelled?

      Dec 12, 2019

      Physics is often baffling, but one principle seems rock-solid: the law of conservation of energy. The world contains this thing called “energy” whose amount never changes. It can change its form or go from one body to another, but its total amount re

      6 min read

    • Article

      Physics Has Demoted Mass

      Nov 9, 2017

      You’re sitting here, reading this article. Maybe it’s a hard copy, or an e-book on a tablet computer or e-reader. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you’re reading it on, we can be reasonably sure it’s made of some kind of stuff: paper, card, plastic, perha

      10 min read

    • Article

      Why Physics Can’t Tell Us What Life Is

      Oct 21, 2020

      There is just something obviously reasonable about the following notion: If all life is built from atoms that obey precise equations we know—which seems to be true—then the existence of life might just be some downstream consequence of these laws tha

      11 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Laws of Thermodynamics

    4.5/5

    10 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      If you're completely new to the field it might be tough to get as much from the audiobook as from a printed book. However if you're at least somewhat familiar with the big picture concepts, you'll likely find this a great review and even gain new insights. The narrator is superb (!) and the chapters are in nice sized chunks for listening. You can easily listen to one chapter, pause, and come back in a day or so and easily pick up. I'm glad I listened.

      1 person found this helpful