ABSTRACT
The Greeks started asking “why” certain phenomena happen, and they developed a complex model of reality where natural phenomena were generated by a certain number of arbitrary acts of gods. Earthquakes, for example, were thought to be caused by the anger of the god Poseidon. The main revolution happened when a group of Greek philosophers abandoned searching for the “why” and shifted their attention to the “how” certain phenomena happened without invoking the act of gods. Modern science is still attempting to understand the working of the Universe by trying to identify a set of basic “laws” that need to be discovered, usually by looking at the results of experiments or observations. In general terms, it is customary to use axioms when dealing with real numbers while postulates are used mostly in geometry. In thermodynamics the state of a system is its condition at a specific time, that is fully identified by the values of a set of parameters.
