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| July 2010 draft-cover for the printed 5-volume set of the Encyclopedia of Human Thermodynamics |
“An encyclopedia's aim is to collect knowledge, disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race.”
“Wikipedia [compared to Britannica] begins with a very radical idea, and that’s for all of us to imagine a world where every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”
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| Left: advertisement for the 11th edition 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica (a reaction to the French Encyclopédie), which is still praised for its excellence, used as reference for some articles of the EoHT. [11] Right a 2010 screenshot of Wikipedia, launched in 2001, the prototype model for wiki-style encyclopedia construction. | |
See main: EoHT (history)The Encyclopedia of Human Thermodynamics was started in December of 2007 (see: progress report) by American chemical engineer Libb Thims in association with Russian physical chemist Georgi Gladyshev in efforts to organize thermodynamics. [8] The core of the EoHT is being built using Thims’ thermodynamic book collection, that he began collecting in 1995, along with his vast file of articles, facts, and notes to organize the set of known information on the thermodynamic understanding of human life, in conjunction with tools such as Google Book Search
, Google Scholar, JSTOR, Amazon, etc., and local and university libraries and book stores in or around Chicago.“To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it; and thus, to know anything — you must know all.”
Thermopedia.com or ) or “A-to-Z Guide to Thermodynamics, Heat & Mass Transfer, and Fluids Engineering Online” (trademarked : THERMOPEDIA™ in circa 2006); based on: created by American physicist and astronomer Eric Weisstein, the biggest math site on the Internet, which currently has more than 13,000 entries, the majority of which were authored by Weisstein. [6] As to the origins of MathWorld, beginning in 1995 Weisstein took the vast collection of mathematical facts that he had been accumulating since his teenage years and began to deploy them on the early Internet. , in association with the Complutense University of Madrid, for people interested in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and computer simulations, with particular focus on simple fluids, complex fluids, and soft condensed matter. The site, as of 2009, however, seems to consist of 950+ mostly-empty stub pages, linked to lists of either related topic articles or related journal articles. It now seems to be a journal article organization website. A now-inactive ThermoWiki, having been an active wiki for a few months (May 27 – July 26) in 2007, was started by American chemical engineer J.M. Haile, which produced 47 articles. (EoE), launched 2006, with approximately 1,000 articles, which uses a one-person peer review sign-off process. As of April 2008, they had a listing of 700+ authors and 2,000+ articles. [5] The thermodynamics articles in the EoE, however, are notoriously filled with obvious errors, particularly when it comes to thermodynamics. [7]