On Jun 22, 8:10 pm, Pentcho Valev <pva...@yahoo.com> wrote:

--- On Sun, 6/22/08, BALIAN Roger <roger.bal...@cea.fr> wrote:

From: BALIAN Roger <roger.bal...@cea.fr>
Subject: RE : VRAIMENT AUCUN ESPRIT CRITIQUE EN FRANCE
To: pva...@yahoo.com, che...@paris7.jussieu.fr, michel.p...@paris7.jussieu.fr
Cc: Jean.Eisensta...@obspm.fr, dam...@ihes.fr, alain.asp...@iota.u-psud..fr, Claude.Cohen-Tannou...@lkb.ens.fr, darri...@paris7.jussieu.fr, angele.marie...@chello.fr, gico...@club-internet.fr, "KLEIN Etienne" <etienne.kl....@cea.fr>, Michel.BIT...@wanadoo.fr
Date: Sunday, June 22, 2008, 11:55 AM
Tout ceci pourrait constituer un nouveau chapitre de
l'intéressant livre d'Alexandre Moatti, Einstein,
un siècle contre lui, Odile Jacob, que je recommande à
tous....

Arthur Eddington était un flagorneur universel:

http://web.mit.edu/keenansymposium/overview/background/index.html
"The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme
position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that
your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's
equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is
found to be contradicted by observation—well, these experimentalists
do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against
the second law of thermodynamics, I can give you no hope; there is
nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation." Sir Arthur
Eddington (The Nature of the Physical World, 1915)

Cette "loi suprême de la Nature" est déjà abandonnée mais en France on
n'en sait rien et n'en discutera jamais:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
JOS UFFINK: "This summary leads to the question whether it is fruitful
to see irreversibility or time-asymmetry as the essence of the second
law. Is it not more straightforward, in view of the unargued
statements of Kelvin, the bold claims of Clausius and the strained
attempts of Planck, to give up this idea? I believe that Ehrenfest-
Afanassjewa was right in her verdict that the discussion about the
arrow of time as expressed in the second law of the thermodynamics is
actually a RED HERRING."

http://www.beilstein-institut.de/bozen2004/proceedings/CornishBowden/CornishBowden.htm
ATHEL CORNISH-BOWDEN: "The concept of entropy was introduced to
thermodynamics by Clausius, who deliberately chose an obscure term for
it, wanting a word based on Greek roots that would sound similar to
"energy". In this way he hoped to have a word that would mean the same
to everyone regardless of their language, and, as Cooper [2] remarked,
he succeeded in this way in finding a word that meant the same to
everyone: NOTHING. From the beginning it proved a very difficult
concept for other thermodynamicists, even including such accomplished
mathematicians as Kelvin and Maxwell; Kelvin, indeed, despite his own
major contributions to the subject, never appreciated the idea of
entropy [3]. The difficulties that Clausius created have continued to
the present day, with the result that a fundamental idea that is
absolutely necessary for understanding the theory of chemical
equilibria continues to give trouble, not only to students but also to
scientists who need the concept for their work."

http://www.worldscibooks.com/chemistry/6469.html
A FAREWELL TO ENTROPY by Arieh Ben-Naim (The Hebrew University,
Israel)
"The principal message of this book is that thermodynamics and
statistical mechanics will benefit from replacing the unfortunate,
misleading and mysterious term "entropy" with a more familiar,
meaningful and appropriate term such as information, missing
information or uncertainty. This replacement would facilitate the
interpretation of the “driving force” of many processes in terms of
informational changes and dispel the mystery that has always
enshrouded entropy."

S'il y avait un esprit critique en France, on aurait été profondément
ému par ce texte:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
pp. 7-8, Jos Uffink: "The historian of science and mathematician
Truesdell made a detailed study of the historical development of
thermodynamics in the period 1822–1854. He characterises the theory,
even in its present state, as ‘a dismal swamp of obscurity’ (1980, p.
6) and ‘a prime example to show that physicists are not exempt from
the madness of crowds’ (ibid. p. 8). He is outright cynical about the
respect with which nonmathematicians treat the Second Law: "Clausius’
verbal statement of the second law makes no sense [. . . ]. All that
remains is a Mosaic prohibition; a century of philosophers and
journalists have acclaimed this commandment; a century of
mathematicians have shuddered and averted their eyes from the unclean.
(ibid. p. 333). Seven times in the past thirty years have I tried to
follow the argument Clausius offers [. . . ] and seven times has it
blanked and gravelled me. [. . . ] I cannot explain what I cannot
understand (ibid. p. 335)." From this anthology it emerges that
although many prominent physicists are firmly convinced of, and
express admiration for the Second Law, there are also serious
complaints, especially from mathematicians, about a lack of clarity
and rigour in its formulation. At the very least one can say that the
Second Law suffers from an image problem: its alleged eminence and
venerability is not perceived by everyone who has been exposed to it.
What is it that makes this physical law so obstreperous that every
attempt at a clear formulation seems to have failed? Is it just the
usual sloppiness of physicists? Or is there a deeper problem? And what
exactly is the connection with the arrow of time and irreversibility?
Could it be that this is also just based on bluff? Perhaps readers
will shrug their shoulders over these questions. Thermodynamics is
obsolete; for a better understanding of the problem we should turn to
more recent, statistical theories. But even then the questions we are
about to study have more than a purely historical importance. The
problem of reproducing the Second Law, perhaps in an adapted version,
remains one of the toughest, and controversial problems in statistical
physics."

Puis l'Esprit Critique de France, s'il existait, chercherait et
trouverait peut-être l'erreur fondamentale en analysant, mot par mot,
la déduction fondamentale de Rudolf Clausius:

http://web.lemoyne.edu/~giunta/Clausius.html
"Ueber die bewegende Kraft der Warme" 1850 Clausius: "If we now
suppose that there are two substances of which the one can produce
more work than the other by the transfer of a given amount of heat,
or, what comes to the same thing, needs to transfer less heat from A
to B to produce a given quantity of work, we may use these two
substances alternately by producing work with one of them in the above
process. At the end of the operations both bodies are in their
original condition; further, the work produced will have exactly
counterbalanced the work done, and therefore, by our former principle,
the quantity of heat can have neither increased nor diminished. The
only change will occur in the distribution of the heat, since more
heat will be transferred from B to A than from A to B, and so on the
whole heat will be transferred from B to A. By repeating these two
processes alternately it would be possible, without any expenditure of
force or any other change, to transfer as much heat as we please from
a cold to a hot body, and this is not in accord with the other
relations of heat, since it always shows a tendency to equalize
temperature differences and therefore to pass from hotter to colder
bodies."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com