At some point in your schooling you learned the Laws of Thermodynamics. And then, at some point shortly thereafter (or at least, shortly after the test on them), you promptly forgot them. And even if you later in life you kept up with reading about science, well, there was always something sexier to read about: black holes, new particles, rovers zipping around on Mars. But in Einstein’s Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and cold Explains the Universe, Paul Sen is here to argue thermodynamics deserves both your attention and your respect, seeing as how it lies at the foundation of just about all our technological advancement. And darn if he doesn’t make the case.

On the one hand, the Laws (Sen really focuses mainly on the first two), are pretty simple to formulate: energy can never be created or destroyed but is always conserved and the entropy of the universe is always increasing. But while the words are simple, learning why those things are true was fiendishly difficult. And explaining it so non-scientists understand it (as any high school physics teacher will attest) isn’t much better. But while it took a host of curious and brilliant people (including well known luminaries like Maxwell, Einstein, Turing, and Hawking) centuries to do the former, Sen take just over 200 pages to do the latter and do it supremely well.

Sen begins in Britain in the early 1800s with Sadi Carnot, who despite dying tragically at age 36, is known as “the founding father of the science of thermodynamics.” From there, Sen methodically and clearly marches through time and science as one discovery after another furthers human knowledge of heat, entropy, and the basic underpinnings of the universe. It’s also a walk through technological progress, from steam engines to internal combustion engines to that titular home appliance (and yes, Einstein did form a business to design better and safer refrigerators) to the transistor and the silicon computer chip. One of the more interesting aspects of the book is how the technological advancements often came prior to understanding the underlying scientific fundamentals, and often raised the questions that provoked study of the basic science that allowed for the technology to work.

The narrative is never anything but crystal clear, with Sen lucidly and carefully laying out the science, aided by a number of greatly appreciated illustrations. He also makes frequent use of analogies to make the unfamiliar and esoteric more familiar and grounded in something easier to understand, a typical tool in popular science books. Here, though, things are a bit of a mixed bag. While many of the analogies helped illuminate their subjects, a few I thought were actually a bit muddy, leaving me wondering if that made things more complicated than simpler. Meanwhile the thumbnail sketches of the many important figures such as the aforementioned household names, along with others such as Kelvin, Joule, Helmholtz and others are concise but engaging and at times even moving, as with the tragic early death of Carnot, or the suicides of Bernoulli and Turing.

Einstein’s Fridge is wonderfully clear, winningly concise, peppered with interesting personal stories, and leaves you knowing more about its topic than you did going in. Not that you should feel too bad about how little you knew at the start, given that Sen closes with a story of how even Steven Hawking got thermodynamics wrong. So maybe the rest of can be forgiven for needing just the book Sen provides us.

Paul Sen has created a fascinating book discussing the history of physics from the mid-19th century to the present as he takes the reader on a journey through the development of the field of thermodynamics.

During our journey we meet men and women who shaped this new field of study. Some of those we meet are well-known (e.g. James Watt), some are well-known for their contributions in other fields (e.g. Alan Turing), and some are more obscure (e.g. Emmy Noether). Regardless of their reputation, each contributed significantly to the body of knowledge we now know as thermodynamics.

Focusing on the people, the book is not a mathematical monograph, but uses a series of thought experiments to help his readers understand the growth of this subfield of physics. It was interesting how new ideas grew upon each other and, occasionally, folded back on an earlier researcher to again further the world’s understanding of the relationship between heat and cold. The book will be appreciated by anyone with a basic high school or college freshman physics course under their belt.

Two notes found in the Epilogue of the book help the reader understand the author's intention of writing this work:

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At its heart, this book is a celebration that between 1850 and today the science of heat has played a vital role in promoting the greatest improvement in the human condition in our species’ entire history.

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The main obstacle to dealing with climate change isn’t scientific. Instead, it’s political and emotional. While some refuse to accept that the problem exists, others refuse to accept the solutions.That brings me back to why I wanted to write this book. Now, more than ever, it’s important that all of us have a basic grasp of the science of heat, so that we can make sensible and informed decisions about how best to ensure progress while preserving or improving living conditions fo fellow humans without ruining the environment. Should we commit to nuclear energy? Should we drive electric cars? How much tax should we pay on petrol, and how much should we subsidize wind farms? We will be in no position to answer these vitally important questions unless we have a basic understanding of the laws of thermodynamics.

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Weaving together Carnot’s basic understanding of heat, Turing's application of information theory and embryology, and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, as well as the work of many others, I give the book five stars.r our
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This review is based on a free electronic copy provided by the publisher for the purpose of creating this review. The opinions are mine alone.

This was...

...I gotta be honest, this was dry.

I don't know, maybe it wasn't for me, but since <i>Einstein's Fridge</i> is being touted as "for fans of <i>A Brief History of Time</i> and </i>How We Got to Now</i>," I think I was expecting something a little more attention-grabbing from the get-go.

This book, in its opening chapters, purports to detail how the history of science is the history of us all, and I don't disagree! I don't disagree in the least, and I think that scientific literacy should also include an understanding of the history of science, since that makes it very clear that scientific "facts" are not the be-all end-all of truth, that new theories and ideas are being put forth constantly and paradigms are never not shifting.

But then <i>Einstein's Fridge</i> does just that. It's just... the history. And for someone whose biggest gripe with popsci books, especially popular physics books, is that they waste 75% of their pages on the history of physics before they get to the new, good, interesting stuff, maybe this just wasn't for me. Yes, it's deeply important to understand old concepts and why they were shifted or changed or built-upon before understanding the new stuff, and if thermodynamics is a concept that's new to you and you don't know about that wild zeroth law, then <i>Einstein's Fridge</i> is probably a good place to start. However, if you're already a fan of the aforementioned <i>A Brief History of Time</I> and <i>How We Got to Now</i>, then I feel I must say that <i>Einstein's Fridge</i> is probably a book you don't need. It's thorough, yes, incredibly so, and ties together ideas and concepts from the inception of thermodynamics to the concepts physicists are working on and with today. But I didn't find much new here, nor did I find an interesting or unique spin. It's a fine text, and an easy read with few embellishments, but if you're already a fan, you might be just fine skipping this one.