Thermodynamics & Marital Bliss

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Footnote on Page 77 of Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything':


"The Chemist P. W. Atkins says: There are four laws of Thermodynamics. The third of them, the Second Law, was recognized first; the first, the Zeroth law, was formulated last; the First Law was second; the Third Law might not even be a Law in the sense of the others".

In the briefest terms, the Second Law states that a little energy is always wasted. You can't have a perpetual motion device because no matter how efficient, it will always lose energy and eventually run down. The First Law says that you can't create energy and the Third Law that you can't reduce temperature to absolute zero; there will always be some residual warmth.

As Dennis Overby notes, the three principal laws are sometimes expressed jocularly as:

(1) You can't win

(2) You can't break even

(3) You can't quit

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A mild rewording would render these as the

"gps's Laws of Marital Bliss"

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I read from this very readable book that most of the 18th and 19th Century British Scientists and Explorers were wealthy individuals of independent means free to pursue science as a hobby for pleasure.

And their 'wealth' came from the British Empire.

Before that there was hardly any British Science to speak of; or the means to keep the Empire down by the Guns propelled by these laws of science they discovered:

As it was put by Hilaire Belloc, in the words of the figure "Blood" in his poem "The Modern Traveler":

Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.


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