How It's Used

"'Classic' Canadian long poems—like Margaret Atwood's 'Journals of Susanna Moodie' or George Bowering's 'Kerrisdale Elegies'—employ a consistent form throughout. Spalding moves around. Her main form is the short lyric/narrative—left-justification, line breaks, division into stanzas. But she also employs the open-form verse associated with William Carlos Williams, as well as prose poems, monologues, and prose pieces. Spalding feels strongly that form or structure should be intrinsic to content, and sees her somewhat disjointed, fragmentary poetic narrative as appropriately reflecting her story of destruction and loss in the 'red century' (further encapsulated in the motif of the three laws of thermodynamics, summarized by one of the characters as: 'Energy cannot be created or destroyed./And the entropy of the universe is always increasing./There will always be more loss.')"

—Libby Scheier, “Novel in verse impresses,” The Toronto Star, July 5, 1997, p. L17.

“While the Atkins diet delights its followers, it still perturbs the scientific community. Because it allows unlimited calorie intake, scientists wonder where all this energy is going; apparently this breaks the first law of thermodynamics. While Dr Atkins, who died last year, might not have known exactly why the pounds drop off, experts have finally come up with some viable theories. However, no one knows yet what the long-term effects on health will be.”

—Mary Novakovich, “Thursday Television: Pick of the Day,” The Guardian (UK), January 22, 2004.

"By far the smallest section of the book [Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel] is reserved for Class III impossibilities, those that violate the known laws of physics. Perhaps surprisingly, the comparatively modest idea of a perpetual motion machine, first tried out in Bavaria in the 8th century and revisited regularly by hoaxers and hopers ever since, falls into this category, as it defies the three laws of thermodynamics. Morever, even as the 20th century has supplied quantum theory and the General Theory of Relativity to complicate the 19th-century picture, the conservation of energy has remained impregnable. As Kaku puts it, 'any violation of these laws would necessarily mean a profound shift in our understanding of the evolution of the universe'. Even so, Kaku is not prepared entirely to rule this out. Even ideas like precognition and dark energy, or the quest to know what happened before Big Bang or to achieve a grand 'theory of everything', instead of representing the absolute boundaries of our knowledge, should better be understood as challenges to the next generation of scientists: 'These limits are like piecrusts, made to be broken.' And as he well knows, it is likely to be a small child like him, fired up by tales of dark lords and mystic forces, who breaks them.”

—Emma Crichton-Miller, “Science: The Wilder Our Dreams, the More Important They May Be for Science,” The Sunday Telegraph, April 27, 2008.

“To develop his theory, Dr. Wolynes zeroed in on an observation made decades ago, that the viscosity of a glass was related to the amount of entropy, a measure of disorder, in the glass. Further, if a glass could be formed by cooling at an infinitely slow rate, the entropy would vanish at a temperature well above absolute zero, violating the third law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy vanishes at absolute zero.

"Dr. Wolynes and his collaborators came up with a mathematical model to describe this hypothetical, impossible glass, calling it an 'ideal glass.' Based on this ideal glass, they said the properties of real glasses could be deduced, although exact calculations were too hard to perform. That was in the 1980s. 'I thought in 1990 the problem was solved,' Dr. Wolynes said, and he moved on to other work.”

—Kenneth Chang, “The Nature of Glass Remains Anything But Clear,” The New York Times, July 29, 2008.

“The concert was the musical embodiment of the first two laws of thermodynamics—that energy can neither be created nor destroyed and that all things tend toward chaos. Now, 40 years later, you can see the concert in its blistering entirety. 'I Got the Feelin’: James Brown in the ’60s,' a three-DVD set being released this week by Shout Factory, includes the April 5 Boston show, a VH1 documentary about that night and a March 1968 concert at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. The documentary is padded with banal interviews with talking heads—Cornel West, the Rev. Al Sharpton—who provide little insight into the inscrutable Brown. (The Apollo DVD feels like an afterthought—footage of a solid performance, annoyingly edited.) But the Boston concert, despite its abysmal audio mix, is an astonishing document. Unlike Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones tribute film 'Shine a Light,' this footage captures an artist at his most brilliant.”

—Brian Braiker, “Boston’s Soul Savior: A new DVD set captures James Brown at his peak—including his historic MLK memorial concert,” Newsweek, August 11, 2008.

Links

Related on eAlmanac
The Three Laws of Motion
The Three Laws of Robotics

Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia article on the Three Laws of Thermodynamics