Description
Book SynopsisEntropic Creation is the first English-language book to consider the cultural and religious responses to the second law of thermodynamics, from around 1860 to 1920. According to the second law of thermodynamics, as formulated by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius, the entropy of any closed system will inevitably increase in time, meaning that the system will decay and eventually end in a dead state of equilibrium. Application of the law to the entire universe, first proposed in the 1850s, led to the prediction of a future ''heat death'', where all life has ceased and all organization dissolved. In the late 1860s it was pointed out that, as a consequence of the heat death scenario, the universe can have existed only for a finite period of time. According to the ''entropic creation argument'', thermodynamics warrants the conclusion that the world once begun or was created. It is these two scenarios, allegedly consequences of the science of thermodynamics, which form the core of this bo
Trade Review’... an exemplary history of ideas, which taxonomizes and critiques a spectrum of arguments about thermodynamics and cosmology, clearly demarcating newer from older ways of thinking. Particularly fascinating is his account of the staying power of the conservative and theological connotations of thermodynamic cosmology into the Cold War, when it became part of Soviet orthodoxy that laboratory physics could not be applied to the infinite universe. The book will interest scholars of science and religion as well as historians of physics.’ British Journal for the History of Science ’Pour découvrir en détail les tenants et les aboutissants de ces débats, rien de tel que le livre érudit, novateur et passionnant d’Helge Kragh. [...] Kragh montre en effet que les liens historiques entre philosophie, religion et science sont complexes. C’est un autre mérite de ce très bon livre.’ Pour la Science ’Je ne peux que recommander ce livre riche, original et passionnant, à toute personne qui s'intéresse à l'histoire de la physique, et en particulier celle de la cosmologie, mais aussi aux philosophes et théologiens qui abordent aujourd'hui le débat 'science-foi'.’ Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences
Table of ContentsChapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 Some Early Ideas on Decay and Creation; Chapter 3 Thermodynamics and the Heat Death; Chapter 4 The Entropic Creation Argument; Chapter 5 Concepts of the Universe; Chapter 6 Post-1920 Developments; Chapter 7 Shadows from the Past;
