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5 unusual facts about thermodynamics


Thermodynamics

Guericke was driven to make a vacuum in order to disprove Aristotle's long-held supposition that 'nature abhors a vacuum'.

Drawing on all the previous work led Sadi Carnot, the "father of thermodynamics", to publish Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire (1824), a discourse on heat, power, energy and engine efficiency.

Historically, thermodynamics developed out of a desire to increase the efficiency and power output of early steam engines, particularly through the work of French physicist Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1824) who believed that the efficiency of heat engines was the key that could help France win the Napoleonic Wars.

Shortly after Guericke, the physicist and chemist Robert Boyle had learned of Guericke's designs and, in 1656, in coordination with scientist Robert Hooke, built an air pump.

For example, processes in a region of turbulent flow, or in a burning gas mixture, or in a Knudsen gas may be beyond "the province of thermodynamics".


Athanase Dupré

Louis Victoire Athanase Dupré (1808–1869) was a French mathematician and physicist noted for his 1860s publications on the mechanical theory of heat (thermodynamics); work that was said to have inspired the publications of engineer Francois Massieu and his Massieu functions; which in turn inspired the work of American engineer Willard Gibbs and his fundamental equations.

Bernard H. Lavenda

Professor Lavenda currently lives in Trevignano Romano near Rome, is married with two adult children and two grand-children, for whom his textbook "A New Perspective on Thermodynamics" is dedicated.

Charles L. Brooks III

Dr. Brooks co-authored "Proteins: A Theoretical Perspective of Dynamics, Structure, and Thermodynamics" (Wiley Interscience, 1988) with 2013 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Martin Karplus, and B. Montgomery Pettitt.

Close to Critical

The book is set on the planet Tenebra, a planet of the star Altair and a world with thick atmosphere, a shifting crust, crushingly-strong gravity and surface temperatures of just over 374 degrees Celsius, close to the critical point of water.

E.G.D. Cohen

In 2004 Cohen received the triannual Boltzmann Medal from the Committee on Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, its highest award for contributions to statistical mechanics.

Energy technology

Thermodynamics deals with the fundamental laws of energy conversion and is drawn from theoretical Physics.

Entropy and life

Similarly, according to the chemist John Avery, from his recent 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution, we find a presentation in which the phenomenon of life, including its origin and evolution, as well as human cultural evolution, has its basis in the background of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory.

Flow network

The field of ecosystem network analysis, developed by Robert Ulanowicz and others, involves using concepts from information theory and thermodynamics to study the evolution of these networks over time.

François Massieu

François Jacques Dominique Massieu (1832-1896) was a French thermodynamics engineer noted for his two 1869 characteristic functions, each of which known as a Massieu function (the first of which sometimes called free entropy), as cited by American engineer Willard Gibbs in his 1876 On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances.

Hippolyte Carnot

Hippolyte was the younger brother of the founder of thermodynamics Sadi Carnot and second son of the revolutionary politician Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot, who also served in the government of Napoleon.

Homeokinetics

The subject, described as the physics and thermodynamics associated with the up down movement between levels of systems, originated in the late 1970s work of American physicists Harry Soodak and Arthur Iberall.

Irreversible

Irreversible process, in thermodynamics, a process that is not reversible

Jnan Chandra Ghosh

He researched problems of photo-chemistry and strong electrolytes in the University College which earned appreciation from leaders of science like Walter Nernst, Max Planck, William Bragg and G. N. Lewis and was cited in Walter Nernst's reputed book "Theoretical Chemistry" (1921) and Lewis and Randall's book "Thermodynamics".

JTAC

Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes papers covering all aspects of thermal analysis, calorimetry, and experimental thermodynamics.

Levi L. Conant Prize

2002: Elliott Lieb und Jakob Yngvason for A Guide to Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Notices of the AMS, Vol.

Ogston

Alexander George Ogston — biochemist specialised in the thermodynamics of biological systems

Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil

Paul Raeburn wrote in The New York Times that Goodstein's prediction regarding peak oil and future of civilization is based on an understanding of physics and thermodynamics, and on a simple observation about natural resources.

Raoult's law

Raoult's law is a law of thermodynamics established by French physicist François-Marie Raoult in 1882.

Redlich

Redlich–Kwong equation of state, equation in thermodynamics developed by Otto Redlich

Redlich–Kwong equation of state

It was presented jointly in Portland, Oregon at the Symposium on Thermodynamics and Molecular Structure of Solutions in 1948, as part of the 14th Meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire

The Reflections contain a number of principles such as the Carnot cycle, the Carnot heat engine, Carnot's theorem, thermodynamic efficiency.

Richard Oriani

Oriani then went to the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, where as Research Associate he studied, among other topics, the thermodynamics of solid metallic solutions, the order-disorder reaction in superlattice systems, nuclear magnetic measurements of hydrogen in metals, and Knight Shift measurements in liquid alloys.

Self-information

This term was coined by Myron Tribus in his 1961 book Thermostatics and Thermodynamics.

Social thermodynamics theory

The idea of social thermodynamics shows some similarities to the fictional science of psychohistory in Isaac Asimovs Foundation series.

State postulate

The state postulate is a term used in thermodynamics that defines the given number of properties to a thermodynamic system in a state of equilibrium.

Thermodynamic state

For thermodynamics, a thermodynamic state of a system is fully identified by values of a suitable set of parameters known as state variables, state parameters or thermodynamic variables.

Time reversal

In physics, T-symmetry - the study of thermodynamics and the symmetry of certain physical laws where the concept of time is reversed — i.e. where a mirror (reverse) transformation is applied to a forward direction time state.

William A. Brockett

In 1950, he co-authored with Robert M. Johnston Elements of Applied Thermodynamics, which was required reading by naval engineering students of the United States Naval Academy for over forty years.

Zirconium tungstate

This phase is thermodynamically unstable at room temperature with respect to the binary oxides synthesised by heating stoichiometric quantities of these oxides together and then quenching the material by rapidly cooling it from approximately 900 °C to room temperature.


see also