The Discovery of Thermodynamics
Philosophical Magazine ISSN: 1478-6435 (Print) 1478-6443 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tphm20 The discovery of thermodynamics Peter Weinberger To cite this article: Peter Weinberger (2013) The discovery of thermodynamics, Philosophical Magazine, 93:20, 2576-2612, DOI: 10.1080/14786435.2013.784402 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14786435.2013.784402 Published online: 09 Apr 2013. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 658 Citing articles: 2 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=tphm20 Philosophical Magazine, 2013 Vol. 93, No. 20, 2576–2612, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14786435.2013.784402 COMMENTARY The discovery of thermodynamics Peter Weinberger∗ Center for Computational Nanoscience, Seilerstätte 10/21, A1010 Vienna, Austria (Received 21 December 2012; final version received 6 March 2013) Based on the idea that a scientific journal is also an “agora” (Greek: market place) for the exchange of ideas and scientific concepts, the history of thermodynamics between 1800 and 1910 as documented in the Philosophical Magazine Archives is uncovered. Famous scientists such as Joule, Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Clau- sius, Maxwell or Boltzmann shared this forum. Not always in the most friendly manner. It is interesting to find out, how difficult it was to describe in a scientific (mathematical) language a phenomenon like “heat”, to see, how long it took to arrive at one of the fundamental principles in physics: entropy. Scientific progress started from the simple rule of Boyle and Mariotte dating from the late eighteenth century and arrived in the twentieth century with the concept of probabilities.
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