Physically Impossible?

TL;DR

This paper introduces an innovative educational format that visualizes thermodynamics principles like reversibility, efficiency, and entropy to illustrate their impact on sustainability, economic value, and environmental limits.

Contribution

It presents a novel interactive approach to teaching thermodynamics concepts in the context of sustainability and economic constraints.

Findings

Participants visualized thermodynamics principles effectively.

The approach demonstrated the physical limits to economic growth.

It linked thermodynamics to environmental and economic issues.

Abstract

Halfway between the experiment and the focus group, between the quiz and a game, we have experienced a new format to "focus" on sustainability and the fundamental laws of thermodynamics and its principles. Concepts as reversibility, efficiency and entropy, are then "visualized" by the participants, showing the relations with the economic value, waste, the energetics budget and raw material costs are explained from a different point of view, proving the physical limits to the economic growth and the environmental exploitation.