Monday, January 7, 2013

Feverish Ramble

Still under the weather, which is to say 'sick,' since technically I'm under the weather whenever I'm not under the roof.

Was that funny? I can't tell right now. I seem have lost my humor-sensors along with the olfactory.

Oh well. I was reading the other day about the Laws of Thermodynamics (insert the requisite warning about Wikipedia here--as you can tell, I use it anyway). Apparently, they were developed by civil engineering and physics professors to make steam engines more efficient in the 19th century.

Any first year physics student can tell you how important the Laws of Thermodynamics are. They are so important, in fact, that they would have correctly predicted that the universe is expanding, if only we had grasped their full import sooner.

I'm left wondering if we would have stumbled on these theories without steam technology or if steam technology was a vital link in the chain of events leading to our modern world.

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