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Home , Anders Celsius, Hermann von Helmholtz, Macquorn Rankine

School of and Junior Honours

Thermodynamics 1 History of (Longair, Physics World Sep 2006) Notes: Anniversary of Boltzman’s death 5 Sep 1906.

Charles Percy Snow (1905-1980) Writer/ who introduced the term ‘corridors of power’ [book title 1963]

The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959) A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of . Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics, law of . The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: “Have you read a of Shakespeare’s?” I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, “Can you read?” not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.

Inspired song Flanders and Swann from the show ‘at the drop of another hat’ (1963-67).

Heat is work and work’s a curse And all the in the Universe Is gonna cooool down ’cos it can’t increase Then there’ll be no more work and there’ll be perfect peace Really? Yeah - that’s entropy, man!

Etymology thermodynamics from greek “heat” + “” - a term first used by in 1854. entropy from greek “transformation” - first used by Clausius in 1865.

1file history.pdf

1 History_chart

Kenneth G Wilson Constantin Carathéodory James Dewar Joannes Van der Waals James Clerk William Thompson () Rudolph Clausius Robert von Mayer Sadi Carnot Lazare Carnot Count Rumford Antoine Lavoisier Joseph Black Anders Daniel Gabriel Thomas Newcomen Isaac

1600 1650 1700 1750 1800 1850 1900 1950

year

Historical notes Thomas Newcomen (Bri. 1664-1729) Blacksmith. Previously had been used to produce a vacuum to suck up water (max of 32 feet). Denis Papin used the raised water to drive a water wheel. Newcomen’s engine was the first, in 1712, to directly produce mechanical . For comparison James (1736-1819) much later and was more zealous patenting his invention.

Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (Ger. 1686-1736) First modern , alcohol (1709) and mercury (1714). Parents died from eating a mushroom. Daniel had to make his own way, worked mostly in Holland. The exact choice of the Fahrenheit scale is shrouded in mystery. It is commonly thought to span the coldest he experienced to the temperature of a body. 32 degrees for the freezing point of water could also correspond to 32 degrees of enlightenment of Freemasonry (cf the expression “3rd degree” has its origins in Freemasonry).

John (Bri 1820-1872) There have been many other temperature scales including one advanced by the Scottish physicist William John Macquorn Rankine (1820-1872) in 1859. Rankine is better known for working out the closed cycle of a (water converted to steam). Born in died in where he was Prof of . Student of UoE 1836- 8; left without a degree (not unusual). Predicted correctly that the specific heat of saturated steam is negative studied water vapour isotherms. T-scale had same interval

2 as Fahrenheit, but 0 at absolute zero. Interestingly Celsius’ scale has zero defined at the boiling point of water and 100 as the ice point and Delisle defined temperature according to the thermal contraction of mercury from the boiling point of water.

Anders Celsius (Swede. 1701-1744) From a scientific academic family. Created instruments for geographical studies.

Joseph Black (Bri. 1728-1799) Born in Bourdeaux to Scottish wine trading family. Enrolled at Glasgow to study arts, switched to medecin after 4 years. Prof of Anatomy and Botany then medicine, age 28. Defined heat capacities and . Noted that since C(T) depends on the material heat and temperature are not the same. Lab assistant was . 1766 suceeded his mentor Prof. Cullen in chairs of chemistry and medecine at Edi. James Watt (1736-1819) made an important improvement to Newcomen’s engine by allowing steam to condense in a separate vessel from the piston and cylinder.

Antoine Lavoisier(Fre. 1743-94) Caloric theory of heat. French noble - father of modern chemistry - beheaded in french revolution.

Benjamin Thompson ≡ Count Rumford (American, 1753-1814) Arrogant (likened himself to Newton as Roy. Soc. address) womaniser/gold digger (mis- tress/wife = former wife of Lavoisier) - boiled water by boring holes in cannons.

Lazare Carnot (Fre. 1753-1823) Jailed for seducing a betrothed woman - french revolutionary organizer. Contribution “The further water falls the more you can get out of it”.

Prof James Dewar (Bri 1842-1923) Prof Dewar, Is a better man than you are, None of you assess, Can condense [Edmund Clerihew Bentley]. Studied (chemistry) under Lord Playfair at Edinburgh Uni- versity becoming his assistant. Prof at Cambridge. Liquified gases (including pints of oxygen and first liquification of hydrogen). Invented vacuum flask but failed to patent it losing out on commercialisation to German ’thermos’.

Rev. Dr. Robert Stirling 1790-1878 1805 to 1808, attended Edinburgh University, where he studied Latin, Greek, Logic, and Law. Then theology in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Motivated to make a safer engine for his parishinors avoiding high P steam made (and patented) first working engine in 1818 before publication of Carnot engine in 1825.

Sadi Carnot (Fre. 1796-1832) Only publication “reflections on the motive power of heat” ignored at the time. Thought of heat flowing like water in a mill. Son of Lazare. Died in an asylum Age 36.

3 Robert Meyer (Ger. 1814-1878) Observed blood is redder in the tropics (body does less work keeping warmer) - wrote a paper about the interchangeability of mechanical work and heat (1840). Depression caused by priority battle with Joule - attempted suicide (3rd floor jump) and ended up in asylum.

James Prescott Joule (Bri. 1818-1889) Paper on mechanical equivalent of heat received badly by conference organisers at Oxford; told to be brief (but is heard by Kelvin). Work rejected for publication by Royal Soci- ety and published instead in Philisophical Magazine. Carried out many key experiments analyzed by Kelvin via an epistolary collaboration (through letters) including magne- tostriction, temperature scales and Joule-Thompson effect. Son of Manchester brewer. Received an honary degree from Edin. in 1871. Taught by chemist John from age 16-19 (never went to university).

Hermann von Helmholtz (Ger. 1821-94) Contested priority of Kelvin/Tait owing to his 1847 paper “the conservation of force”.

Rudolph Clausius (Ger. 1822-88) Confronts Joule-Carnot dilemma. Identifies 2 principles (a) conservation of (b) conversion of work into heat. Considers spontaneous direction of heat transfer processes to give entropy. Writes down the 2 in 1872; “the energy of world is constant: the entropy of the world strives towards a maximum”.

William Thompson ≡ Lord Kelvin (Bri. 1824-1907) Born in Belfast, gifted son of self made Math professor from Ballynahinch. Family moves to Glasgow when William is 10 where his father is Prof. of maths. After Glasgow and Cambridge universities William reads only published comment on Carnot’s theorem ever printed while in Paris, but can’t find original. His election to professor of natural philos- ophy at Glasgow, age 22, is carefully orchestrated by his father! Puzzled by Joule-Carnot contradiction. Writes “Treatise on Natural , the Principia of themodynamic” (1867) with Peter Tait . Tait and Clausius battle for priority over the laws of thermody- namics with lots of public mud throwing. Kelvin was the first to realize in 1854 that only one fixed point is necessary to define the temperature scale.

James Clerk Maxwell (Bri. 1831-1879) Promotes idea that second Law is statistical. Term “Maxwell’s demon” coined by Kelvin. The relation between velocity and temperature of a perfect gas (equipartition theorem for linear motion) was first published in Edinburgh 15 years before Maxwell by (1811-1883), an ex-student of the UoE while working in India for the East India company. Waterston’s work first published at his own expense in 1843 was rejected for publication by the Royal Society due to an unfavourable referee report that described it as a load of nonsense. Maxwell later calculated the distribution of velocities.

4 Joannes Diderik van der Waals (Dutch 1837-1923) Became teacher because couldn’t enter university because of poor classical language train- ing. Rules changed; work on gases in PhD thesis - became prof at U. Amsterdam. Nobel prize in 1910 for work on gases, law of corresponding states and the contribution this made to the successful liquification of He by Onnes.

Lord James Dewar (Bri 1842-1923) Studied at UoE under Lord Playfair becoming Playfair’s assistant. 1875 Jacksoninan Prof of Nat Phil Cambridge, later Pres of the Chemical Society, Developed Cordite a smokelss altenrative to gunpowder with Frechman Frederick Augustus Abel. 1891 Showed that oxygen and ozone are magnetic. Although the inventor of the vacuum flask it was patented by Thermos. In 1898 used Joule-Thompson expansion to liquify (20K) and then in 1899 to solidy hydrogen. Despite several nominations for the Nobel prize lost out to Onnes who was the first to liquify helium in 1906. Professor Dewar Was a better man than you are. None of you asses Can condense gases. –Edmund Clerihew Bentley (a Clerihew is a poem starting with the name of a famous person in the first line)

Ludwig Boltzmann (Austrian. 1844-1906) New proof of 2nd law - explains why entropy increases with time introducing the prob- abilistic theory of entropy. Chairs in Mathematics and then in experimental physics. During latter he explained how we get irreversible behaviour from microscopic atoms that obey reversible equations, following on from Maxwell. Depressed, hangs himself while family out swimming.

Wilhelm Wien (Ger. 1864-1928) Dependence of black body radiations on temperature.

Max Planck (Ger. 1858-1947) Fitted heat radiation, thermodynamics and stat mech together introducing Plancks con- stant (1900). Birth of .... Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck for quantum mechanics we must thank but in finding a rhyme for entropy sadly, he drew a blank

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