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| American physical chemist Gilbert Lewis' famous "broad highway of thermodynamics" quote. [2] |
“Thermodynamics cannot be fathomed in all its profundity in a single pass.”— Joseph Kestin (1966), A Course in Thermodynamics [31]
“Thermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go through it, you don't understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time you go through it, you know you don't understand it, but by that time you are so used to it, it doesn't bother you anymore.”— Arnold Sommerfeld (c.1950) when asked why he had never written a book on the subject [11]
“With thermodynamics, one can calculate almost everything crudely; with kinetic theory, one can calculate fewer things, but more accurately; and with statistical mechanics, one can calculate almost nothing exactly.”Newly found— Eugene Wigner (date) [27]
“Luddites and anti-intellectuals do not master the differential equations of thermodynamics or the biochemical cures of illness ... they stay in thatched huts and die young.”— Edward Wilson, On Human Nature (1978) [9]
“For the second law [of thermodynamics], I will burn at the stake.”— Heinz London (c.1933), comment made to H. Montgomery during his time at Harwell [1]“Frequent unqualified references to the principle of minimum entropy production, [are] quite often used to bolster teleological arguments.”— Irvin Richardson (1968) [28]
“[We] do not feed on negentropy [like] a cat laps up milk."— Linus Pauling (1987) [25]
“I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer—born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow. As an engineer, I take a substantial amount of pride in the accomplishments of my profession.”
Human thermodynamics— Neil Armstrong (2000), in a rare February public appearance (link), comment to America’s National Press Club (link)
See main: Human thermodynamics quotesThe following are noted quotes related to thermodynamics applied to questions of human concern, human existence, or human experience:
“Indeed, the true role of entropy in that great circle of sciences, including sociology, which may be classified as the energetic sciences, is far broader and more important than even these words may indicate.”— Sidney Reeve (1907), “The Question of Entropy” (see: what is entropy debate) [26]
“If thought is capable of being classified with electricity, or will with chemical affinity, as a mode of motion, it seems necessary to fall at once under the second law of thermodynamics. Of all possible theories, this is likely to prove the most fatal to professors of history.”
– Henry Adams (1910), A Letter to American Teachers of History [23]
Founding quotes
“What can one say about the philosophical bravado, the cosmic effrontery, the sheer panache of this ailing philosopher with one foot in the grave talking down the second law of thermodynamics? It is a scene fit to set alongside the death of Socrates.”— Robert Richardson (2007) on William James' derogation of Henry Adams' 1910 A Letter to American Teachers of History. [10]“The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which everything, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die. The world came into being with the signing of this contract. A scientist calls it the second law of thermodynamics.”— Annie Dillard [24]
“He was a practical electrician fond of whiskey, a heavy, red-haired brute with irregular teeth. He doubted the existence of a Deity but accepted Carnot’s cycle, and he had read Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry.”— H.G. Wells (1906), The Door in the Wall, and Other Stories, Lord of the Dynamos [20]
The following are classic quotes in thermodynamics:
“The fascination of a growing science lies in the work of the pioneers at the very borderland of the unknown, but to reach this frontier one must pass over well traveled roads; of these one of the safest and surest is the broad highway of thermodynamics.”
— Gilbert Lewis (1923) Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances (1923) [2]
“A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts.”— Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes (c. 1940s) [4]
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
— Max Planck, on how Boltzmann's statistical thermodynamics and atomic hypothesis triumphed over those as Ernst Mach and others of the energetics school (c. 1947) [18]
“The concept of an independent system is a pure creation of the imagination. For no material system is or can ever be perfectly isolated from the rest of the world. Nevertheless it completes the mathematician’s ‘blank form of a universe’ without which his investigations are impossible. It enables him to introduce into his geometrical space, not only masses and configurations, but also physical structure and chemical composition. Just as Newton first conclusively showed that this is a world of masses, so Willard Gibbs first revealed it as a world of systems.”— Lawrence Henderson, The Order of Nature: An Essay (1917) [5]
See main: Entropy quotesThe following are quotes related to the second law or entropy in general:
“The second law is the most metaphysical laws of physics since it points out without interposing symbols, without artificial devices of measurements, the direction in which the world is going.”— Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907)“Entropy is an extremely baffling conception. It is sometimes erroneously treated as if it were simply a statistical, a probable, or thermodynamic factor, without any material basis. Its material basis is almost never defined and is seldom even alluded to in books on thermodynamics.”— Albert Mathews (1927), The Nature of Matter, Gravitation, and Light [1]
“If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.”
— Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1928) [3]
“There’s as many formulations of the second law as there have been discussions of it.”– Percy Bridgman, The Nature of Thermodynamics (1941) [17]
“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the second law of thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?”
— C. P. Snow, 1959 Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”. [7]
“One of the most fabled and mystical principles in science.”
— Dennis Overbye (2001) Einstein in Love. [8]
“The second law of thermodynamics has a complicated genealogy.”
— Luis Fernández-Galiano, Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy (1982) [12]
“Every question or effect has the right to exist if it does not contradict the second law of thermodynamics”.— Boris Pavlovich (c.1950) (link)
The following are other noted thermodynamics quotes:
“It must be admitted, I think, that the laws of thermodynamics have a different feel from most of the other laws of physics. There is something more palpably verbal about them—they smell more of their human origins. The guiding motif is strange to most of physics; namely, a capitalizing of the universal failure of human beings to construct perpetual motion machines of either the first or the second kind. Why should we expect nature to be interested either positively or negatively in the purposes of human beings, particularly purposes of such unblushingly economic tinge?”— Percy Bridgman, The Nature of Thermodynamics (1941) [13]
“Every mathematician knows it is impossible to understand any elementary course in thermodynamics.”
— Vladimir Arnold, “Contact Geometry: the Geometrical Method of Gibbs’ Thermodynamics” (1989) [15]
“All kinds of private metaphysics and theology have grown like weeds in the garden of thermodynamics.”
— Erwin Hiebert, 1966 “The Uses and Abuses of Thermodynamics in Religion”. [16]
“Gentle mathematicians and physicists still cling to their laws of thermodynamics, and are almost epileptic in their convulsive assurances that they have reached a generalization which will hold good. Perhaps it will. Who cares?”— Henry Adams, June letter, 1903 [19]“What in the ever-loving blue-eyed world do these [Ulanowicz's] innocuous comments on thermodynamics have to do with ecology!”— Anonymous manuscript reviewer, The American Naturalist (1979); in Growth and Development (1986) by Robert Ulanowicz.
The following are miscellaneous oft-repeated quotes with thermodynamics mentions:
“In whatever system where the weight attached to the wheel should be the cause of motion of the wheel, without any doubt the center of the gravity of the weight will stop beneath the center of its axle. No instrument devised by human ingenuity, which turns with its wheel, can remedy this effect. Oh, speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest. Go and take you place with the seekers after gold.”— Leonardo da Vinci (1494) [32]
“To teach ethnology, the philosophy of history, political economy and the theory of the state, to men who have not learned these first principles of sociology, is like teaching astronomy or thermodynamics to men who have not learned the Newtonian laws of motion.”— Franklin Giddings, The Theory of Sociology (1894)
“The future belongs to those who can manipulate entropy; those who understand but energy will be only accountants.”Evolution— Frederic Keffer [24]
“The use of thermodynamics in biology has a long history rich in confusion.”— Harold Morowitz (1992), Beginnings of Cellular Life [34]
— Roger Caillois, Coherences Aventureuses (1973), [6]
— Fritjof Capra (1996), The Web of Life [30]
“I hesitate to use the terms ‘first law’ and ‘second law’, because there are almost as many ‘first laws’ as there are thermodynamicists, and I have been told by these people for so many years that I disobey their laws that now I prefer to exult in my criminal status and non-condemning names to the concrete mathematical axioms I wish to use in my outlaw studies of heat and temperature. The term ‘entropy’ seems superfluous, also, since it suggest nothing to ordinary persons and only intense headaches to those who have studied thermodynamics but have not given in and joined the professionals.”— Clifford Truesdell (date) [21]
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| An example thermodynamics quote by American creationism spokesperson Ben Stein as found at IZQuotes.com. [29] |
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| An example thermodynamics quote by American broadcaster Mark Hyman from IZQuotes.com. [29] |
