Entropic Creation
Dave Monroe
against.the.dave at gmail.com
Mon Jun 2 08:27:21 CDT 2008
Kragh, Helge S. Entropic Creation:
Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.
Entropic 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 book.
The heat death and the claim of cosmic creation were widely discussed
in the period 1870 to 1920, with participants in the debate including
European scientists, intellectuals and social critics, among them the
physicist William Thomson and the communist thinker Friedrich Engels.
One reason for the passion of the debate was that some authors used
the law of entropy increase to argue for a divine creation of the
world. Consequently, the second law of thermodynamics became highly
controversial. In Germany in particular, materialists and positivists
engaged in battle with Christian - mostly Catholic - scholars over the
cosmological consequences of thermodynamics.
This heated debate, which is today largely forgotten, is reconstructed
and examined in detail in this book, bringing into focus key themes on
the interactions between cosmology, physics, religion and ideology,
and the public way in which these topics were discussed in the latter
half of the nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth century.
http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&pageSubject=0&calcTitle=1&title_id=10474&edition_id=11118
Science, Technology and Culture, 1700–1945
Science, Technology and Culture, 1700–1945 focuses on the social,
cultural, industrial and economic contexts of science and technology
from the 'scientific revolution' up to the Second world War. It
explores the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the
eighteenth century, the coffee-house culture of the Enlightenment, the
spread of museums, botanic gardens and expositions in the nineteenth
century, to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, seen as a victory for
German science. It also addresses the dependence of society on science
and technology in the twentieth century.
Science, Technology and Culture, 1700–1945 addresses issues of the
interaction of science, technology and culture in the period from 1700
to 1945, at the same time as including new research within the field
of the history of science.
http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=1710
More information about the Pynchon-l
mailing list