Long before Andy received his rock pick to shape the rocks that he was collecting from the ground of the Shawshank yard, he was an isotherm. Red commented on how Andy appeared to the others as he collected his rocks:
He had a quiet way about him, a walk and a talk that just wasn't normal around here. He strolled. like a man in a park without a care or worry. Like he had on an invisible coat that would shield him from this place.Red narrated, after the escape:
In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank prison. All they found of him was a muddy set of prison clothes, a bar of soap, and an old rock hammer, damn near worn down to the nub. I used to think it would take six-hundred years to tunnel under the wall with it. Old Andy did it in less than twenty. Oh, Andy loved Geology, I guess it appealed to his meticulous nature. An ice age here, million years of mountain building there. Geology is the study of pressure and time. That's all it takes really, pressure, and time. That, and a big god-damned poster.Prison is like a pressure cooker. And from the ideal gas law, pV = nRT, we know that when pressure is increased, if the volume of the container does not change, and if the amount of substance inside the container does not change (n), the temperature must increase.
Under pressure, I suppose we can all learn to expand our minds a bit, or give our souls room to grow. That takes some of the pressure off. Some containers expand more easily than others. But inside a prison for a crime you didn't commit, being raped by grown men, abused by officials...those things cause the mind and soul to atrophy.
So how did poor Andy not just break, like the other men? How is it he didn't meltdown? How is it he retained hope? Well, it is evident from his "invisible coat," and his insistence upon retaining hope (see Shawshank Sunday I or II), and identifying with his previous life through chess and teaching others...that Andy did not melt down. Further, the "invisible coat" he had on long before he knew he planned to escape the pressure cooker. He wanted the rock hammer to make chess pieces with, and it was fortuitous for him that the walls of his prison were old and cheap, and fortuitous for him that he was on an end unit of a cell block, and that he was a "pet prisoner" who avoided surprise inspections, and got to keep his poster up to cover his escape. He wanted the rock hammer just to keep his mind sane, in other words, but he got a lot more, and a lot of luck.
Take an airtight container with some fixed moles of gas at a given pressure, volume, and temperature. Put this container in a hydraulic press. Push the button to begin increasing pressure. Put your hand on the side of the container. It is warmer than it was before. If the container is an adiabat, it will exchange no heat with the surroundings. If the container is an isotherm, it will exchange the maximum heat with the surroundings, and reachieve the pre-work temperature.
Andy is depicted as an isotherm. I am usually an adiabat. Put us both under pressure, and we both feel the heat immediately. It is whether or not the heat dissipates that determines whether we have isotherms or adiabats.
Andy is like a scuba tank, placed into the water beside the boat, to be refilled with gas. If you don't put scuba tanks in the water to refill them, they will not exchange as much heat with the air as they would with the water. If you don't allow a container to exchange heat with the surroundings, it will be limited by the pressure it can withstand, (like a scuba tank, which has a given psi rating and gauge) and will not be able to hold as much substance as a container under the same pressure which is losing heat to the surroundings. So, tanks filled while immersed in water end up giving divers more air, and more time to dive.
Andy was put under great stress at Shawshank. He never lost hope. He never lost his identity. They never broke him.
Andy is just as susceptible to the pressure as all the other men. He is supposed to be human, as they are. The human container is of a universal material, and its contents may change in quality, but not in quantity.
Andy was able to release the heat generated from the pressure of prison. Red surmised, later on, that if things had continued as they started for Andy, working in the laundry and fighting off "The Sisters" all the time, that Andy would have eventually broken. But the warden learned of Andy's prior occupation, and put him in the library to put his gifts to use. Andy then had some lucky things going for him. But if his state of mind was not one which was open, and willing to hope, and bold, he would never have escaped. It is not enough that the luck happened. He was already an isotherm.
We are all adiabats at times, and isotherms at others. A container which is covered in Styrofoam is naturally adiabatic. A thin-walled container (or a container with a low heat capacity) immersed in a fluid is isothermal. Andy is fictional. We are not. In reality, no isothermal system can be thought of that is both well-insulated and able to exchange maximum heat. At times we need our insulation to protect us from the influences of our environment. Containers put under pressure, and with a simultaneously-raised surroundings temperature, do not last very long at all. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics tells us that heat exchange always proceeds downhill--if the container is not warmer than its environment, it needs to be insulated when put under pressure, or it will likely explode.
An interesting property of adiabats and isotherms can be seen in the density state plot versus temperature (see here)--it is the actualization of what Nernst said about the 3rd Law in 1906:
The entropy change of a system during a reversible isothermal process tends towards zero when the thermodynamic temperature of the system tends towards zero [Nernst 'principle'].The ability to perform an adiabatic, gas compression-type process approaches zero as temperature approaches absolute zero. All processes become isothermal near 0K. Why? The 2nd Law. Heat will flow from the system outward to the surroundings when the surroundings are near 0K. It is impossible to do work upon a cylinder of gas (compress it) without raising the surroundings temperature near 0K.
Sometimes we need to prevent the surroundings from cracking us. Times of solitude and quiet, meditation and rest. Sometimes we need to get away from the high temperature of the surroundings, and insulation is the only way to protect ourselves.
Sometimes we need to remove this insulation, remove the thick walls that separate us from one another, immerse ourselves in others, and allow energy to freely exchange. If the surroundings are so damn cold, without energy, and we have some to spare...let Nernst's principle rule.
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