Learning about “heat death of the universe” from a college physics professor is one reason Charlie Copeland has been at work for the past half-century as an energy conservation-minded mechanical engineer.
“At age 20 or so, I thought, ‘Whoa, so that’s the end of the universe?’” recalls the president and CEO of New York City-based engineering consultant Goldman Copeland Associates PC in sharing his thoughts on learning about the 19th-century theory by William Thomson, the First Baron Kelvin, of absolute-zero fame. It hypothesizes that when energy equalizes everywhere, stars will die and almost all matter will decay.