Note: I received a free unpublished proof of this book, for a limited time, in exchange for an honest review. All opinions here are my own.

Despite being a chemistry major, I have not read a lot of chemistry books. This is because chemistry coursework usually focuses on general textbook topics or requires you to read very specific papers for a project. However, I am perfectly capable of reading chemistry books on any chemistry topic that interests me. Since nobody in chemistry knows everything about every form of chemistry, there is always going to be at least a bit of unfamiliar material in advanced books, even if you are a Professional Science Person. (This should be obvious, and is true of nearly every topic, but chemistry is often done a disservice in media by being portrayed as a smaller, more self-contained topic than it actually is, so I felt it wouldn’t hurt to add this note.)

The Second Law is a detailed investigation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, whether it’s always true, the authors’ own work relating to the law, and the origins of the law in the history of chemistry. The back of the book contains copies of the author’s earlier papers on the law, a detailed bibliography, and a comprehensive index.

The first chapter is very informative with a lot of good pictures that help to demonstrate the results of the equations discussed. It is very detailed and math-based, eschewing the overly-simplified narrative nonfiction style of many bestsellers. Due to its complexity I only recommend this book to people with a great deal of interest in chemistry, mathematics, or physics. I wouldn’t say it’s only for professionals, because the subject matter here is highly conceptual and will be interesting to anyone interested in science, not just researchers working within a very specific topic, environment, or context. However, the reader needs a solid background in mathematics (up through calculus), basic chaos theory principles, kinetics, and thermodynamics in order to even begin to understand this chapter. There were bits of this that I didn’t quite get myself despite having a general understanding of what all those things are. If you have a copy of Atkins Physical Chemistry (10th edition), most of the background information you need is in there. If you don’t, and you haven’t studied any chemistry past high school, fear not; a lot of it can be found here: Physical Chemistry (LibreTexts)
. The same website has multiple books on thermodynamics (Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics

). All of these books are free to access.

The second chapter is less heavy and mostly focuses on the author’s own career and research. As someone who is looking to do a Ph.D. in chemistry, it was interesting to see the path that he took. I imagine that even people who aren’t interested in doing graduate-level STEM careers might be interested in reading about how science and math professionals get their start in research.

The third chapter is about how the second law was derived and how this research may or may not hold up in real life. This was another information-heavy chapter with a few bits that went over my head, and included a lot of primary sources copy-pasted as images that were sort of difficult to read. For time reasons I had to skip over a lot of those but the author summarizes them well, and only provides them as evidence to back up his points so the audience understands where his arguments and conclusions are coming from.

The last section of the book includes copies of some of the original papers, plus some early papers by the author himself. I did not read through all of these, partly for time reasons, but also because I have not read enough scientific papers to evaluate how good they are as scientific papers. They were not written for this book, so I can not evaluate their content as if it were a fourth chapter either. That said, they are all topically relevant to the subject matter of the first three chapters and provide interesting background information for readers who want to read more academic work on the subject.

Since I’m planning to research chaos theory, dynamical systems, statistical mechanics, and other topics in this area of physical chemistry, I might actually invest in a copy of this if I have enough money left over after getting necessary textbooks for my Ph.D. programme. Overall, I recommend this book to anyone with a high level of interest in physical chemistry, mathematics, physics, and chemistry.

The Second Law: Resolving the Mystery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a wide ranging, surprisingly casually presented examination of the second law of thermodynamics by Stephen Wolfram. Released 1st Aug 2023 by Wolfram Media, it's 584 pages and is available in hardcover, and ebook formats.

There is, interestingly, no soft opening; the author jumps directly into the meat of his history with, and self-proclaimed increased understand of, the second law. It's a very graphics heavy volume and readers who have a background in and are comfortable with computational physics and analysis will find the information more accessible than casual readers.

The book's organization is eccentric. There are three main sections: the author's claims and refinements to the understanding of the second law, his personal history with the subject matter over the course of his lifetime (which is full of anecdotes and moderately accessible and fun to read), and a general history of thermodynamics. The length and breadth of the book's reach will mean that few (if any) readers will study it cover to cover. As with most academic works, the detailed table of contents with sub-chapter page locations will allow readers to select relevant info and skip around as needed.

The chapter notes are copious, full of wry and percipient personal recollections and insights. The notes alone are likely worth the price of admission. It's an unconventional text, but readers who are familiar with the author will expect no less. It does come through quite clearly that he's used to being the undisputed brightest bulb in the room. I'm certainly not his intellectual equal, but the distinct self-aggrandizement did surprise me a bit.

Four stars (readers should keep in mind that the subject requires effort). It should be noted that a specialist background will be required to make an informed decision about the veracity of the deeper suppositions and their implications for our understanding of related subjects.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

A wonderful book. Highly recommended. You will enjoy reading it. Written in a very engaging prose. Nowhere would you feel being stuck or bored. Pick it up if you get a chance. A wonderful science book. Thanks to the author for a review copy.

The Second Law is an intriguing textbook that is a patchwork of essentially three separate works rolled together. Probably the most intriguing portion of the work to readers who are computational physical scientists trying to learn about the second law of thermodynamics (like myself) is the middle segment. It is essentially an autobiography that is delivered in a visual and historical style. Primary documents and pictures are leveraged to do most of the story telling rather than narration.

This visuals forward style is held throughout the work, where the figures and equations appear to be doing most of the work while Wolfram keeps his commentary pithy and and casual.

Admittedly, some of this work is beyond my ken or at least I cannot justify the investment necessary to make it my ken. However, Wolfram's textbook on the second law is quite clearly preoccupied with extremely important questions and is eager to drive to the bedrock on these slippery ideas. I loved that Wolfram has refused to accept the pat answers of prior science and work assiduously to flesh out these ideas.

This book has an intriguing premise but a bizarre organizational scheme. The book offers insight into the Second Law of Thermodynamics couched as the author's personal journey of discovery. Put simply, the Second Law says that entropy increases, or the coffee cup next to me can fall and break into many pieces but it can't / won't reassemble itself, alternatively, I can mix milk into the coffee in the cup, but not unmix the milk out of it. Of course, this simplification is -- in fact -- a massive oversimplification and there are a number of definitions of entropy and different ideas on the conditions under which its increase holds and why. This is part of what the book investigates.

Let's start with the book's intriguing premise. It is that: a.) the Second Law and its implications are not as well (or fully) understood as the scientific consensus suggests, and b.) the key to understanding entropy's increase may be found in the concept of computational irreducibility. This all ties to Wolfram's work with cellular automata and the finding that apparent randomness can come about from a simple set of rules that are non-random. In other words, cellular automata could produce a pattern that can only be determined by re-running said simple set of rules -- i.e. there would be no way to compute it. As (apparent) randomness plays an important role in the Second Law, Wolfram proposes a connection that has ramifications for critical issues like reversibility. (Remember we can't unmix the milk out of the coffee [without expending more energy and within the confines of an open system] or so it's believed.)

When I say the book's organization is strange, I do so with the assumption that the intended readership includes those who are scientifically literate but not expert in thermodynamics or physics. The first part of this strangeness is that the body of the book concludes with an overview of the development of the Second Law (arguably this is information a non-expert reader might benefit from having up front.) The second element of strangeness is that much of the latter part of the book is just connective tissue between excerpts of other people's writing on the subject. This increases the page count tremendously and doesn't serve readability well.

The book does have a good deal of interesting and informative graphics. It also has copies of scholarly papers and relevant chapters from Wolfram's previous book, "A New Kind of Science" for those who are capable of, and interested in, taking a deeper dive into the science and mathematics under consideration.

I found this book to be thought-provoking if a bit tedious to read in places. If you're interested in the Second Law, it's worth reading and may shed new light on the topic.

This is a difficult book to review. First, I don't know who the target audience is. If you're new to Wolfram's work, this doesn't seem like the place to start. If you're already a fan, you probably know the subject matter well enough and need to look somewhere else for new content.

Woflram starts by doing something I often wish other authors would do - he jumps right into his topic with no preamble. However, this time it left me wanting some background, as it's a technical subject unique to him. I can follow the basic theory easily enough, but there comes a point when I felt I understood what he was doing so I began to take his word for it as he kept revealing more complex outcomes, rather than tracing each one out to make sure it was right, His main point is that all the complexity we see in the universe could come from very basic building blocks following a few simple rules when they interact. I searched a little, read the Wikipedia entry, and learned that professional physicists don't necessarily agree, at least not to the extent that Wolfram takes it.

Wolfram talks a lot about himself, repeatedly reminding us how smart he is, how early he got his physics degree, etc. It's all true, but it might read better coming from a biographer than the subject himself. The book itself is hard to categorize - is it a physics revolution or just a lone genius' Mentaculus?

I did finish the book, I did feel satisfied by the end, and I did turn to another of his books after this. I think it's thought-provoking enough, despite the issues I mentioned, to rate it higher than average just to draw some attention to it. The book made me think like few other books have, and that's a big part of the satisfaction.

If you're up for a challenge, if you like to read popular science books and can handle something a little more technical than most entries in the field, you might be the target audience I was wondering about.