Thursday, February 15: Large Numbers and Small Probabilities. Read Lightman, pages 61-77.
Tuesday, February 20: The Second Law. Read Schroeder, pages 56-59.
Thursday, February 22: Entropy. Read Goldstein and Goldstein, pages 400-406, or any other introduction to the mathematics of logarithms. Then read von Baeyer, Chapter 13.
Tuesday, February 27: How Entropy is Related to Temperature. Read the modified version of Section 3.1 from Schroeder (handed out in class).
Thursday, March 1: Entropy, Information, and Computing. Read the modified version of Section 3.2 from Schroeder (handed out in class). Then read von Baeyer, Chapters 12 ("The Mechanical Demon") and 18 ("Four Obituaries for the Demon").
Tuesday, March 6: Engines. Read Moore, Six Ideas that Shaped Physics, Chapter T8, up to page 106.
Thursday, March 8: Refrigerators and Heat Pumps. Read the rest of Moore, Chapter T8.
Tuesday, March 20: Chemical Reactions and Phase Transformations. Read Goldstein and Goldstein, Chapter 11.
Last modified on 26 February 2001.