Introduction
It can be argued with some vehemence that thermodynamics is just about the most boring field of study in all of physics. With all due respect to a vastly important and verifiably useful field, thermodynamics is not, at a core conceptual level, a particularly interesting subject.
Many study physics in search of escape—the great unknowns of astronomy or the mind-boggling, unintuitive nature of quantum mechanics. Thermodynamics, on the other hand, doesn’t at all carry that same mythicism.
On the contrary, your first ventures into something like quantum mechanics will yield exceptionally interesting results (as a pedagogical tool, they are often designed to). Even as you complete your first lessons in the field, you come to some truly perplexing and profound conclusions: that things can exist in superposition, our complete theory of the world can never be “realistic” and local (Bell’s theorem), and nature, at the smallest scale, is intrinsically discrete.
When you first finish a long, intense bout of thermodynamic calculations, you can only hope to come to the striking realization of: “Oh, I suppose the system would then heat up by 10 degrees Kelvin.”
Thermodynamics will not attempt to entice you to understand it for the sake of understanding it; you will instead need to have the discipline to work through it simply because it is necessary preliminary for what lies ahead.
To summarize, the problems I and many others have long had with the field (that you should bring upon yourself to be made aware of before proceeding):
- Compared to most other fields of physics, it’s conceptually dull.
- The mathematics are tedious to perform (as one fellow student once put it, thermodynamics is a “zoo of partial derivatives”).
- Thermodynamic systems and calculations describe macroscopic, “real-life” scenarios, unlike the (arguably) more exciting areas of other physics studies.
And so finally, only now that we have been made keenly aware of all the troubles one will likely face as a physics student making the initial venture into thermodynamics, we will study exactly what I warned of for its excess of real-world analogs and unrelenting mundanity.
But hey, maybe that’s your thing.