The Second Law: Resolving the Mystery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics by Stephen Wolfram
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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This book has an intriguing premise but a bizarre organizational scheme. The book offers insight into the Second Law of Thermodynamics couched as the author’s personal journey of discovery. Put simply, the Second Law says that entropy increases, or the coffee cup next to me can fall and break into many pieces but it can’t / won’t reassemble itself, alternatively, I can mix milk into the coffee in the cup, but not unmix the milk out of it. Of course, this simplification is — in fact — a massive oversimplification and there are a number of definitions of entropy and different ideas on the conditions under which its increase holds and why. This is part of what the book investigates.

Let’s start with the book’s intriguing premise. It is that: a.) the Second Law and its implications are not as well (or fully) understood as the scientific consensus suggests, and b.) the key to understanding entropy’s increase may be found in the concept of computational irreducibility. This all ties to Wolfram’s work with cellular automata and the finding that apparent randomness can come about from a simple set of rules that are non-random. In other words, cellular automata could produce a pattern that can only be determined by re-running said simple set of rules — i.e. there would be no way to compute it. As (apparent) randomness plays an important role in the Second Law, Wolfram proposes a connection that has ramifications for critical issues like reversibility. (Remember we can’t unmix the milk out of the coffee [without expending more energy and within the confines of an open system] or so it’s believed.)

When I say the book’s organization is strange, I do so with the assumption that the intended readership includes those who are scientifically literate but not expert in thermodynamics or physics. The first part of this strangeness is that the body of the book concludes with an overview of the development of the Second Law (arguably this is information a non-expert reader might benefit from having up front.) The second element of strangeness is that much of the latter part of the book is just connective tissue between excerpts of other people’s writing on the subject. This increases the page count tremendously and doesn’t serve readability well.

The book does have a good deal of interesting and informative graphics. It also has copies of scholarly papers and relevant chapters from Wolfram’s previous book, “A New Kind of Science” for those who are capable of, and interested in, taking a deeper dive into the science and mathematics under consideration.

I found this book to be thought-provoking if a bit tedious to read in places. If you’re interested in the Second Law, it’s worth reading and may shed new light on the topic.

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