The grand aim of science is to cover the greatest number of experimental facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.

Albert Einstein

All things are made of atoms . In that one sentence there is an enormous amount of information about the world.

Richard Feynman

Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics are to me the most satisfying branches of physics. To set Mark Twain ^[1] on his head, nowhere else in science can one obtain such wholesale returns of fact out of so trifling an investment of conjecture. However, while both deal with the same subject matter and share many of the same concepts, they differ diametrically in their approach.

Thermodynamics concerns itself with such questions as, what are the minimum experimental data needed to predict the boiling point of a particular liquid as a function of pressure? What is the maximum possible efficiency of a given design of engine? Will a given gas cool down or heat up when it is expanded through a nozzle? Thermodynamics is beautiful in the way mathematics is beautiful, because it is true. Just as no one will ever prove that we ve been wrong in believing 1997 to be a prime number, so the second law of thermodynamics will never be proven false. No other branch of physics can make that claim with certainty. Even quantum theory, while it has turned out to be valid at energies and distance scales never...