H = G +TS
I was walking through the hallowed halls of MIT (shameless plug) the other day. OK, actually I was in their athletic center and I was drooling at the ice rink wondering how to get in - never did though. So they have this painted glass ceiling which has all kinds of stuff that looks like it was painted on by students as part of the 'decor'. Among the abstract swaths of color I noticed a few formulas and I thought it was great that, hey, MIT is a place where there is no stigma to knowledge, where you don't have to gather in hushed circles looking at equations and posting lookouts for the local bully. You can paint it on the ceiling, the walls, anywhere without fear of a wedgie. It's a place where it's ok to view an equation as something artistic, something that I thought about in the previous post.
So there were a couple of the old standards painted on the glass ceiling. For example, I'm pretty sure I saw E = mc2. But lingering in the big collage was : H = G + TS. Believe it or not, that's some where up there in my top ten favorite equations. Now THAT would make a good sidebar! I'll have to think about that. I like the equation partly because it involves the term for entropy, S. I think I won't go into the details, but the equation is an important consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, and I've always liked thermo. Some scientists treat thermo like Latin, as if it's a dead language or something. But it's just the opposite. It's a rare example of a complete theory in science. It's both accessible and abstract. You can lose yourself in it so easily like a painting. And of course thermo rules everything.