Slightly tangential, but does anyone know of a good layman's book on thermodynamics? I'm interested in the science and the history of it, but I'm not really trying to do a deep dive into the math -- I wasn't bad in stats or calc but that was decades ago now and I haven't really used them since...

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jzl 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

“From Eternity To Here” by Sean Carroll has some nice discussions of it. He can be a bit much at times and could stand to have better editing (the book is 25% too long), but he does have some of the most approachable modern writing on physics out there. Lots of videos on YouTube as well.

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kgwgk 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've not read this particular book but I like Arieh Ben-Naim's approach:

Four Laws That Do Not Drive The Universe, The: Elements Of Thermodynamics For The Curious And Intelligent

https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/10531

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crazygringo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Honestly, this is the type of stuff ChatGPT is really good at. Explaining overviews of a field, avoiding math if you want, focusing on concepts and explaining different schools of thought.

As long as you're sticking to the well-established stuff, it tends to be quite factually accurate. I think it's really underrated as a resource for good high-level overviews of fields where those overviews otherwise don't exist at all, are overly technical, or the existing overviews have a lot of author bias.

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jzl 3 days ago | parent [-]

Ugh, I couldn’t disagree more. Sure, LLMs can generate some really nice introductory summaries of topics. But, so far at least, they can’t even hold a candle to brilliantly written books and long form articles. Consider the classic book Cosmos. There is more insight into the universe in any few pages of that book than could be gathered by reading even a thousand ChatGPT results.

	▲	crazygringo 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		You and I are talking about totally different things. I'm talking about general overviews of topics, where a good book form at the level you're looking for often doesn't even exist. You're talking about a classic book that is recognized as a great work. Nobody's claiming that what ChatGPT outputs is Cosmos. And most books written by people aren't Cosmos either. And most of the time when you want a basic factual introduction to a field that is at your level, neither too popular nor too technical, ChatGPT is really good at providing that. Not everything has to be Cosmos.