In human thermodynamics, Ingo Müller is a German physicist and thermodynamicist noted for his socio-thermodynamics theories, as outlined in his 2002 paper Socio-thermodynamics – Integration and Segregation in a Population, of phenomena such as segregation or population mixing. [1] In 2005, Müller became an Emeritus Professor. In 2007, Müller published A History of Thermodynamics - the Doctrine of Energy and Entropy, a long over-due and greatly-needed book in the field of thermodynamics. In 1985, he published a thermodynamics textbook. [4]

Thermodynamics teachings
He has spent over forty years teaching thermodynamics in four countries (USA, Mexico, Italy, and Germany). For thirty years he was a professor of technical thermodynamics at the Technical University Berlin. During that time, he studied and taught all aspects of thermodynamics from the construction and operation of heat engines and refrigerators to the modelling of the thermo-mechanical behavior of shape memory allows, the swelling of poly-electrolytes, and the light scattering in extremely rarefied gases. He developed extended thermodynamics, which is essentially a thermodynamic theory of irreversible processes in rarefied gases; a theory characterized by attractive mathematical properties such as symmetric hyperbolic field equations. [2]

Socio-thermodynamics

See main: socio-thermodynamics

In his 2005 book Entropy and Energy: A Universal Competition, Müller devotes an entire chapter to the subject of socio-thermodynamics. In this chapter, Müller goes through an example of a metaphorical system of hawks and doves competing for the same limited resource. He compares the segregation and mixing of the two populations to that of physico-chemical systems separations defined by phase diagrams. Through his analogies, he correctly correlates pressure-volume boundary work to that of the ‘part of the habitat lost’ and states that:

"Such analogies emphasize the point of view that physical or sociological systems of many individual elements have common properties, whether the elements are atoms and molecules or birds and (maybe) men."

One funny point, about the modeling of human social life through the difficult science of thermodynamics, as Müller states in his 2007 book A History of Thermodynamics: the Doctrine of Energy and Entropy, is that:

‘It is interesting to note that socio-thermodynamics is only accessible to chemical engineers and metallurgists. These are the only people who know phase diagrams and their usefulness. It cannot be expected, in our society, that sociologists will appreciate the potential of these ideas.’

Here we concur, in that socio-thermodynamics is obvious to the chemical engineer or other mathematically-trained scientists, such as physicists, but the explanation of this obviousness to others is not so easy.

References
1. (a) Müller, Ingo. (2002). Socio-thermodynamics – Integration and Segregation in a Population, P: Continuum Mechanics and Thermodynamics 14, 384-404, 2002.
(b) Symposium held in honor of Ingo Müller (2002) – Special symposium on continuum mechanics and thermodynamics.
2. Ingo Müller - Curriculum Vitae (PDF).
3. Müller, Ingo. (2007). A History of Thermodynamics - the Doctrine of Energy and Entropy. New York: Springer.
4. Müller, Ingo. (1985). Thermodynamics. Pitman.