Quick Post on the Second Law of Thermodynamics

I had a physics professor in college who told our class, “When most people go to Germany they tend to take river cruises and drink white wine.  Physicists visit Boltzmann’s grave.”

I hadn’t thought about this statement in a very long time, until just now when I happened to run across this photo of . . . you guessed it.

Boltzmann was best known for his statistical explanation of the second law of thermodynamics, which he expressed in the elegant equation that you see at the top of the monument.

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy (randomness, chaos) never decreases in a closed system.  Boltzmann explained this in an entirely new, and more precise way, in his equation that says that entropy is proportional to the logarithm of the number of different states that a closed system can find itself in.

OK, plenty of that.  If I may be allowed a bit of gallows humor, a textbook chapter on this subject begins,

“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying Statistical Mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study Statistical Mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.”