Discussion on "teaching the second law"

This article reports an open discussion that took place during the Keenan Symposium "Meeting the Entropy Challenge" (held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 5, 2007) following the short presentations - each reported as a separate article in the present volume - by Joseph Smith Jr., Howard Butler, Andrew Foley, Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli, Bernhardt Trout, Jeffery Lewins, Enzo Zanchini, and Michael von Spakovsky. All panelists and the audience were asked to address the following questions Why is the second law taught in so many different ways'? Why so many textbooks on thermodynamics? Why so many schools of thought? Some say that thermodynamics is limited to equilibrium, others that it extends to nonequilibrium. How is entropy defined for nonequilibrium states? © 2008 American Institute of Physics.