In science wikis, EoHT (history) refers to the pre-history, origin, and ongoing development of the encyclopedia of human thermodynamics (eoht) wiki. A short overview is outlined below.
Overview
In circa 1995, undergraduate chemical student Libb Thims, at the University of Michigan, began to wonder how the spontaneity criterion (ΔG < 0) applies to the central process of society, that in which a man meets a women, they fall in love, produce a child; and entity which then begins to detach from the family household at about the fifteen-year mark; a process that 85 percent of people will go through. In the years to follow, Thims began to read up on mate section books as theorized in evolutionary psychology, in search to find a framework of understanding. The issue, however, remained a puzzle.
15-Year Puzzle |
|
|
|
|
 |  |
|
Male M and female F react yielding the product of a 15-year old child C
| The spontaneity criterion can be used to determines if a reaction if feasible
|
|
|
|
|
On the 2010 occasion of the completion of fifteen-hundredth EoHT article (John Herapath, Jul 7th), it is interesting to note, in retrospect, that this entire encyclopedia, along with the 824-page, two-volume 2007 Human Chemistry textbook, and the 120-page, 2008 book The Human Molecule, a detailed history of the concept of the ‘human molecule’, have purely been a product of the curious question as to how the above reaction can be explained using the above criterion, which arose as a puzzle in the mind of American chemical engineer Libb Thims, while sitting in one of his circa 1995 chemical engineer thermodynamics classes, at the University of Michigan, but for whatever reason, contrary to his regular practice, failing to raise his hand in class to ask the question. |
|
On 15 Nov 2001, at 3:00 AM, while up memorizing anatomy for several hours, during a short mental break, a reading of some of British physicist Stephen Hawking’s 1996 Illustrated A Brief History of Time, chanced Thims on the view that the entropy S of one's central nervous system will decrease during the process of eduction. With this clue, along with ideas that enthalpy H, described by Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes in 1909 as ‘heat content’, may related to physical beauty, and that free energy G, described by American engineer Willard Gibbs in 1873 an ‘available energy’ to do work, the three variables related by the equation G = H – TS, Thims began to glimpse the view that the phenomenon of chemical reaction spontaneity may be able to explain the ‘beauty-brains paradox’, the observed phenomenon that beauty tends to be associated with decreased mental ability where conversely brains tend to be associated with decreased physical appearance, and that the entire average eighteen-year, on average, child production reaction, can be defined, entirely, by a free energy of the reactants in their initial state Gi, the day the two fall in love at first sight, and a free energy of the products in their final state Gf, the day the precipitate of the child detaches from the family.
At that moment, and in the weeks to follow, Thims was content that he had obtained a partial solution to the puzzle. This glimpse into the nature of the second-by-second changes in Gibbs free energy involved in the course of the process of ubiquitous conception of "love the chemical reaction", however, only opened up the door to more puzzles and various "glass walls" of conceptual difficulty, during continued investigations in the decade to follow.
Two months after this 3:00-AM insight, Thims arrived upon the view that it would be in his own interest (objective funding) as well as the public's interest (scientific revolution) if he wrote out a short presentation (article or even a short booklet) on the explication of this logic. In the four years to follow, Thims began to read-up on others to have approached this problem, such as Alfred Lotka, Erwin Schrodinger, Ilya Prigogine, Georgi Gladyshev, and Jing Chen, etc. (a group that would eventual amount to over 300+ thinkers), and to conduct research of his own to find data on various parameters involved in the problem.
 |
The index to the A-Z pages of the HumanThermodynamics.com glossary of terms (click picture), which culminated in the writing of 87 terms (shown above). [1] The HT Glossary + Wikipedia experience was a precursor to the launching of the EoHT wiki. |
In 2005, Thims began to go public with a preliminary presentation, with the launching of the website HumanThermodynamics.com and to contact, interact with, and link up with, via email, phone calls, and meetings, the various dozens of authors, professors, and researchers on the bulk topic of applying thermodynamics to the explication of human activity.
In the course of the writing of the various webpages of HT.com site, various terms, such as 'human molecule' or 'Gibbs free energy', needed either Java script mouse-over pop-up definitions (as some sites used at the time) or hyperlink-to-page definitions. Initially, Thims mainly used the newly launched Wikipedia (2001) to fill this gap, eventually joining on as Wikipedian, owing to the fact that during the course of key-term-hyperlinking to Wikipedia articles, he was forced to join so as to correct the numerous errors he found in those articles; during which period (2005-2007), as a Wikipedia editor, he started over 180 articles and uploaded over 42 images.
Articles for key terms that he could not find in Wikipedia, however, were anchor-linked to paragraph definitions listed the A-Z pages of small glossary of terms, found on the HumanThermodynamics.com website, which culminated in the writing of 87 terms (adjacent). [8] During the writing of these Glossary terms, wherein the slow inefficiency of the of the process setting up each webpage, adding anchor links, linking each anchor link to a second index hyperlink, etc., compared to the ease of use of page creation at Wikipedia, led to the view that a wiki-style human thermodynamics glossary would be needed.
The transition from the idea stage to the startup stage resulted, following a period of several months of difficulty at Wikipedia in attempts to start three articles there: human thermodynamics, human chemistry, and human molecule (still topics not permissible at Wikipedia); owing to numerous community 'consensus' objections, too many to list; after which this site was launched, on 24 Dec 2007 with the writing of three articles: Sadi Carnot, human thermodynamics, and human chemistry.
The essential problem is that Wikipedia is a geared towards articles primarily on only mainstream topics. Attempts to write articles on rare terms and concepts will quickly be deleted at Wikipedia. This wiki was launched, essentially, to fill in that gap, by actively writing on rare terms, such as inverse entropy, or obscure people such as Andre Lalande, or bulk subjects, such as the twelve schools of thermodynamics, without having regard to whether the term, person, or subject is "notable" (meaning requisite to having its own article page) according to Wikipedia standards or if there is some sort of "conflict of interest" in regards to having an expert write on the topic of their expertise. [2] Each topic is thus given a detailed in-depth examination.
Since its launching, the EoHT wiki has been used, essentially, as an online niche encyclopedia, a referenced file cabinet of sorts, for the mental storage of the key terms, topics, biographies, anecdotes, and equations, etc., germane to the subject of human thermodynamics in particular, thermodynamics in general, and those subjects being connective to the former, namely human chemistry and human physics, acting sort of like a niche topic Wikipedia. The main purpose of the encyclopedia, tentatively speaking, is to serve as a general framework of connective terms, topics, and people for the backbone of a possible future college teaching textbook on the subject of human thermodynamics. A prerequisite to this attempt, however, is a completed mastery of the works of Clausius, Gibbs, and Lewis, which has not yet been done by anyone. In the mean time, step-by-step additions to this site serve as growing template towards the completion of this potential task, by someone in the future.
The site's first member (joined: Dec 31) was Russian physical chemist Georgi Gladyshev, author of the famous 1978 article "On the Thermodynamics of Biological Evolution" and the follow-up 1997 book Thermodynamic Theory of the Evolution of Living Beings, whom Thims had been in weekly-monthly discussion with since 2005 in consultation and exchange of ideas in the peer-review of the writing of Thims various books and manuscripts.
Many notable people (and nearly two dozen college professors and teachers) have since joined, including: French physicist Pierre Perrot author of the 1998 A to Z of Thermodynamics, Chinese-born Canadian mathematician Jing Chen, author of the 2005 The Physical Foundation of Economics: an Analytical Thermodynamic Theory, and German physicist Ingo Muller, author of the 2007 A History of Thermodynamics, the first attempt at a full history of thermodynamics, among numerous other authors and intellectuals. The 100th member of the site, user:巩方建, joined on July 19th, 2010, and the 1,500th article, John Herapath, was written on July 07th 2010. The site has since been used as a lecture teaching tool in various college engineering classes.
References
1. Glossary – HumanThermodynamics.com.
2. (a) Wikipedia:Notability – Wikipedia.
(b) Wikipedia:Conflict of interest – Wikipedia.