Editorial Review:
If you want to know what's happening in the world, follow the heat.
Why can't your coffee "steal" heat from the air to stay piping hot? Why can't Detroit make a car that's 100 percent efficient? Why can't some genius make a perpetual motion machine? The answers lie in the field of thermodynamics, the study of heat, which turns out to be the key to an astonishing number of scientific puzzles, including why time inexorably runs in only one direction.
In Warmth Disperses and Time Passes: The History of Heat, physics professor Hans Christian von Baeyer tells the story of heat through the lives of the scientists who discovered it. With his trademark elegant prose, eye for lively detail, and gift for lucid explanation, Professor von Baeyer turns the contemplation of a cooling coffee cup into a beguiling portrait of the birth of a science with relevance to almost every aspect of our lives.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
strong content in a weak book binding.  2007-05-17
apart from that the author used very uncommon vocabulary frequently,
the content is clearly five stars.
i never liked thermodynamics during my bachelor study, but after i read that book i admit that it is fabulous, and now the book is just separate papers out of its binding ! weeeeeee,man it's terrible binding!!!!!!!!
after all , thanks Hans.
Warmth Disperses and Time Passes  2007-01-10
Also titled Temperature and Time Flow Down in Europe; Bayer does an excellent job in explaining this physical phenomenon. I heartily recommend this book for armatures, students, and physicists wanting a fresh perspective.
Missing equations 2004-12-25
An interesting book giving a historical overview.
I have to warn the interested people that the book
is lacking equations.
The only one I found was e=mc*c
If the reader has a rudimentary understanding of mathematics
than (s)he will miss the equations.
On the Trail of a Demonic Idea  2002-05-30
This is an enjoyable history of thermodynamics. Maxwell's Demon does not actually come into it until about half-way through, and then becomes, gradually, the focus. Von Baeyer's approach is to advance his topic short chapter by short chapter. Each chapter treats the work of a man (alas, in science women have not, until recently, played much of a part) as it relates to the growing knowledge of the first and second laws of thermodynamics. The ideas, the experiments, the intellectual milieu, and the subject's life are all fair game in these little essays, and all are treated in a clear, serious, but still light-hearted way. The writing is very pleasing, the author's humane, humorous and cultured personality shines through.The point of the book, of course, is to explore the Second Law of Thermodynamics, using the Demon invented by the physicist Maxwell. It has proved a remarkably troublesome sprite in spite of all the attempts to exorcise it over the years. Here you will learn some thermodynamics and some history, and when you are done you will have a general idea of the issues swirling around the notion of entropy. After reading this book, you very well might want to get your feet wet in an introductory text on thermodynamics, now that you know some of the issues in play. Or, if you already know some, this will fill in the human background, and may alert you to some current thinking. One of the current issues is the relationship between the entropy from Information Theory and the entropy from Thermodynamics. As various folks keep trying to conflate them, our author reports on it. The discussion is detailed enough to actually convey some of the ideas that trouble modern researchers, and tantalizing enough to make the reader want to know even more. What else could one want from a popular book on the subject?
Excellent 2002-04-14
A beautiful book that explains thermodynamics clearly for the layman. I also purchased the author's other book "Taming the atom" which was yet another masterpiece.
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