Entropy and the Magic Flute is a collection of essays by Harold J. Morowitz. Although somewhat dated (it was published more than 20 years ago) the dating is usually not important and sometimes interesting as a reminder of how things have changed.
The essays themselves cover a wide range of topics. For instance, the title essay is about Morowitz's search for the tombstone of Ludwig Boltzmann, who studied entropy and came up with Boltzman's constant. Morowitz contrasts the relative anonymity of Boltzmann (he had trouble finding the site) with the huge fame of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who wrote the Magic Flute and whose grave is not far away.
Another essay, Tricentennial marks the 300th anniversary of the publication of Newton's masterwork: Philosophiae Natrualis Principia Mathematica by analyzing the title page in depth, leading to discussing topics such as Samuel Pepys and the execution of King Charles I.
Other topics include the Hippocratic Oath, why some journals were missing from a library, plagiarism, addiction .... there are 48 essays in all and, since the book is 224 pages long, a little arithmetic shows that the average essay is a little less than 5 pages long.
Harold Morowitz (1927-2016) was a biophysicist who studied the application of thermodynamics to living systems. He wrote several collections of essays as well as more technical books.
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