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poppy_beech's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
bufally47's review against another edition
3.0
Part of me feels unqualified to rate this book; the other part feels justified, as the intended audience seems to be the laypeople of the world. Some of the analogies were really effective. I had a few “aha” moments and it made me feel like less of human garbage to understand how a steam engine works on a basic level. (When I forget in a few weeks or months, to garbage I shall return.) That third law graph/concept was frighteningly bizarre (in a good way, like parallel universes are), though I can almost grasp how, in terms of beta (it was amusing how upset the author is that we don’t use beta instead of Celsius or Fahrenheit), it makes perfect sense. Some of the equations I couldn’t really get no matter how many times I went over them, and I’m still shaky on Helmholtz and Gibbs energies. My only true disappointment, though, is that there weren’t more “big picture” connections that go into, say, the entropy of deep space or the transfer of energy in weather systems. I suppose I should be grateful for the mechanics of refrigerators and especially the part about how ATP is used to build proteins. I should probably reread this sometime.
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