A Matter of Degrees: What Temperature Reveals about the Past and Future of Our Species, Planet, and U niverse

The universes predicted by Boltzmann and Maxwell, and later refined by the thermodynamics of Helmholtz, Gibbs, and Einstein, were universes that evolved into homogeneous soups—soups in which there was no information and energy was no longer free (that is, there was no energy available to perform work).3

Some historic examples of amalgamation are the following. First, take heat and mechanics. When atoms are in motion, the more motion, the more heat the system contains, and so heat and all temperature effects can be represented by the laws of mechanics. Another tremendous amalgamation was the discovery of the relation between electricity, magnetism,