Anyone who hears something about physics or remembers their school days dedicated to the science of the nature of physics usually thinks of mechanics with its laws of motion, optics with its laws of refraction or electrodynamics with its understanding of charges and currents.
The cosmos and atoms often come to mind, and with them the question of what holds the world together at its core. But only in the rarest of cases does anyone think of talking about the theory of heat, which experts like to call thermodynamics. Which brings us to its main theorems. Two of them are highly valued, with the first theorem proclaiming the constancy of energy, while the second deals with a quantity called entropy and tells us that it can only increase and is heading towards its maximum. On the one hand, it is exciting that physical time is given a direction thanks to entropy, while it remains unclear exactly what entropy is. We don't know that about energy either, but that doesn't bother anyone until we learn that great physicists regard energy as the bookkeeper of nature, while they consider entropy to be its director. In fact, how things develop in the world is determined by the director entropy, while the accountant energy ensures the resources. Perhaps it is worth keeping an eye on thermodynamics alongside mechanics. Not only to see better where climate change is taking the earth, but also at what speed it is occurring. These days, British physicists have realized that an age-old assumption is wrong. The warming of a system and its cooling are not mirror-symmetrical events. On the contrary!
"What thermodynamics has to do with climate change..."
It is quite quick to add energy to a system, and it takes much longer to cool it down. The deeper reason for this lies in the distribution of states that components of a system can and must pass through. A good reason to rethink the whole field of thermodynamics. Some physicists want to formulate another law. While the second law states very briefly that hot objects cool down if you do not intervene, the new law points to the possibility that some interventions in nature take more time than others. Ergo: As quickly as the earth warms up, it will take longer to cool down again.
