Identifying the micro behind the macro

I started this thermodynamics website back in 2020 right after the launch of my book, Block by Block: The Historical and Theoretical Foundations of Thermodynamics.

I just completed Section 4 – The Physical Meaning of Thermodynamic Properties of my continually evolving book, The Machinery Underneath, and wanted to share the new material here.

Back in 2006, Tom Archibald, VP, Director of Operations and Engineering for the Rohm and Haas Company, shared with our new hires his Top 10 list of behaviors to achieve a successful career.

I just completed Chapter 9 of my continually evolving book, The Machinery Underneath, and wanted to share the new material here.

As part of the lead-up to our 2016 Centennial Celebration of MIT’s School of Chemical Engineering Practice—affectionately known as “The Practice School”—we interviewed alumni from across the decades and produced a series of short videos exploring a range…

As shared here and here, I’ve begun writing my 2nd thermodynamics book, The Machinery Underneath, in which I will connect the micro-world of moving and interacting atoms to the macro-world of thermodynamic phenomena and the classical equations used to des…

The following is an excerpt from the final chapter of my book, Block by Block – The Historical and Theoretical Foundations of Thermodynamics, in which I took a step back to share a few insights and observations I unexpectedly gathered along the way.

I took a course from Edward Tufte a long while ago on the visual display of information and loved it.

In his Physical Chemistry book (6th Edition, p. 99), Peter Atkins wrote that entropy “is a measure of the molecular disorder of a system.”

If a great many equal spherical particles were in motion in a perfectly elastic vessel, collisions would take place among the particles, and their velocities would be altered at every collision; so that after a certain time the vis viva [kinetic energy] w…