Article April 4, 2011 Issue

A metaphysical lesson from thermodynamics

By Rick Dearborn

As a college physics student in the ’70s, I was required to take introductory chemistry courses for my major. In one of the courses, we were being introduced to concepts of thermodynamics, which is the study of the scientific relationships of heat and cold. While I understood all the other concepts in the class, I was having difficulty getting my math to work in thermodynamics.

I’d been thinking about the process as a number line, with positive numbers being heat, zero being no heat, and negative numbers being cold. In other words, to me cold was a negative power that could cancel out heat and mathematically be subtracted from it. Using this process, I was unable to make my math work out, and I was becoming frustrated.

I visited my professor for help. He quickly discovered what I was doing that was incorrect. He explained that cold was simply the absence of heat—it was not a power that could cancel out or negate the effects of heat. Now that I understood this, my math worked, and I found thermodynamics to be one of my most enjoyable subjects.

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