Entropic Creation

Entropic Creation
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 279
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781317142485
ISBN-13 : 1317142489
Rating : 4/5 (85 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Entropic Creation by : Helge S. Kragh

Download or read book Entropic Creation written by Helge S. Kragh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Entropic Creation is the first English-language book to consider the cultural and religious responses to the second law of thermodynamics, from around 1860 to 1920. According to the second law of thermodynamics, as formulated by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius, the entropy of any closed system will inevitably increase in time, meaning that the system will decay and eventually end in a dead state of equilibrium. Application of the law to the entire universe, first proposed in the 1850s, led to the prediction of a future 'heat death', where all life has ceased and all organization dissolved. In the late 1860s it was pointed out that, as a consequence of the heat death scenario, the universe can have existed only for a finite period of time. According to the 'entropic creation argument', thermodynamics warrants the conclusion that the world once begun or was created. It is these two scenarios, allegedly consequences of the science of thermodynamics, which form the core of this book. The heat death and the claim of cosmic creation were widely discussed in the period 1870 to 1920, with participants in the debate including European scientists, intellectuals and social critics, among them the physicist William Thomson and the communist thinker Friedrich Engels. One reason for the passion of the debate was that some authors used the law of entropy increase to argue for a divine creation of the world. Consequently, the second law of thermodynamics became highly controversial. In Germany in particular, materialists and positivists engaged in battle with Christian - mostly Catholic - scholars over the cosmological consequences of thermodynamics. This heated debate, which is today largely forgotten, is reconstructed and examined in detail in this book, bringing into focus key themes on the interactions between cosmology, physics, religion and ideology, and the public way in which these topics were discussed in the latter half of the nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth century.


Entropic Creation Related Books

Entropic Creation
Language: en
Pages: 279
Authors: Helge S. Kragh
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-04-29 - Publisher: Routledge

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Entropic Creation is the first English-language book to consider the cultural and religious responses to the second law of thermodynamics, from around 1860 to 1
Religious Cosmology
Language: en
Pages: 224
Authors: Paul F. Kisak
Categories:
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-05-09 - Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A religious cosmology (also mythological cosmology) is a way of explaining the origin, the history and the evolution of the cosmos or universe based on the reli
The Return to Cosmology
Language: en
Pages: 290
Authors: Stephen Toulmin
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2023-11-10 - Publisher: Univ of California Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Can we rely on the discoveries that scientists make about one or another part, or aspect, of the world as a basis for drawing conclusions abou the Universe as
The Heavens Are Telling the Glory of God
Language: en
Pages: 320
Authors: Laurie Brink, OP
Categories: Religion
Type: BOOK - Published: 2022 - Publisher: Liturgical Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Building on the work of Teilhard de Chardin, the New Cosmology integrates scientific facts and theories, including discoveries about the expanding universe and
Cosmology, History, and Theology
Language: en
Pages: 414
Authors: Wolfgang Yourgrau
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012-12-06 - Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

It is difficult to doubt that we suffer at present from the manifold aspects of an economic crisis which affects all walks of life. Well, men in almost every ep