Here are some overview comments about this next book you are reading, and some pointers on how to approach the book, and what to pay attention to.

The publishers of Hans Christian von Baeyer’s book Warmth Disperses and Time Passes give readers a preliminary look at the book’s topic by posing the following questions, which will be answered in the chapters: "Why can't your coffee 'steal' heat from the air to stay piping hot? Why can't Detroit make a car that's 100 percent efficient? Why can't some genius make a perpetual motion machine? The answers lie in the field of thermodynamics, the study of heat, which turns out to be the key to an astonishing number of scientific puzzles, including why time inexorably runs in only one direction."

WDTP is a modestly-sized book but it touches on a number of developments that led to the formation of the laws of thermodyanimcs – laws relating to the behavior of heat. Along the way you’ll come across a fair number of names of scientists, many of whom may be new to you, as well as discussions of a wide range of phenomena. In reading this text, the goal is not to try and memorize all of these facts, details and names. The goals instead are two-fold: first, to gain some familiarity with why these questions began to be asked in the 18th century and were given great emphasis across the physical sciences in the 19th century, and, second, how the theoretical advances of the laws of thermodynamics are rooted in real-world phenomena. In other words, while there are many scientific figures who appear in these pages, one way to organize your thinking is not to focus in too tightly on each of these individuals, but to recognize that "the moral of the story" is that these advances are due to the existence of a widespread community of thinkers. The successes in making sense of thermodynamics would not have been possible without this endeavor being one that was collective in nature, and entailed an enormous amount time, effort, and activities on the part of many people.

At the heart of research on heat was curiosity about how it is related to the concept of energy – which, as a general matter, can be defined as the ability to make something move. Keep an eye out for the interrelationships of all three: energy, heat, and motion. (You might want to think about our planetary atmospheric system today as you learn about the past discussions of these three entities: if increases in heat are related to increases in motion and increases in energy, then what would be the ramifications of increasing temperatures in Earth’s climate system? The expectations are not just that the world would get hotter on average, but that because heat is a kind of motion and a form of energy that this would be accompanied by increases in the amount of movement and energy throughout the climatic system, which could lead to weather “events” of greater force and volatility).

While scientific research on heat uses heavy mathematical methods, the heart of the book is captures by this point by von Baeyer on p. 17: that “the law of conservation of energy is not a mathematical truth like the Pythagorean theorem, but the summary of an immeasurable wealth of experience spanning the history of civilization.” Along the way, identify some examples that provide evidence for this assertion.

You will encounter a number of different concepts over the course of the book as von Bayer relates the histories of the many different attempts to understand thermodyanimcs. Among the following, make note of a few of them that you find to be particularly interesting as part of the story: the concept of energy being indestructible; the philosophical concept of "materialism"; the use of mechanical models; probability theory and statistical analysis; entropy; the steam engine; electromagnetism; and the equation e = mc squared.

There are several major historical turning points discussed in this book, and one of the most important of these is the fact, as von Baeyer observes on page 79, that “electricity, magnetism. light and radiant heat are everyday phenomena accessible to our senses and subject to experimental manipulation." . . . and that, when the investigation gets down to the level of atoms and molecules “the rules of the game change.” Why did the rules need to change? How is probability theory seen as being needed in consequence to make sense at the atomic level?

And, finally, a key theme to identify how the variations of studying thermodynamics is not only a story about physics, but it is also a story about the biology of living systems: that is, connections between "physiology" and "physics." As one example, questions arising from calculations of the age of the Earth (considered as a body that was once a molten mass that has been experiencing cooling since the beginning of time) turned out to play a major role in debates about the Darwinian theory of evolution as it arose in the 19th century.

As you get to the final chapters of the book, von Baeyer brings some of the work in physics at the end of the 20th century into the mix. As with the other material, read these chapters to gain some familiarity with how there have been many questions to answer, even a century after the laws of thermodyanimcs were first worked out.