What is the connection between a steam engine and the theory of relativity? What links Sadi Carnot's ideal engines, Einstein, the squeaking refrigerator in our kitchen, and a heated rod with the end of the world? Why can't anything reach a temperature lower than -273.15°C? And what exactly is entropy, and how is it possible for it to keep increasing endlessly?

In Einstein's Refrigerator, Paul Sen vividly narrates the history of thermal science, starting from the early theories of "caloric fluid" and reaching up to quantum theory in a branch of science whose importance we often forget, even though its applications are found everywhere around us...