a
PERHAPS TIME IS THE GREATEST MYSTERY
Even the words that we are speaking now
thieving time
has stolen away,
and nothing can return. (I, 11)
I stop and do nothing. Nothing happens. I am thinking about nothing. I
listen to the passing of time.
a
Clausius introduces a quantity that measures this irreversible progress
of heat in only one direction and, since he was a cultivated German, he
gives it a name taken from ancient Greek—entropy:
I prefer to take the names of important scientific quantities from ancient languages, so
that they may be the same in all the living languages. I therefore propose to call entropy
the quantity (S) of a body, from the Greek word for transformation: ἡ τροπὴ.
A
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