Early Version of Extended Thermodynamics and Kinetic Theory of Gases

The laws of Fourier, Fick, and Navier-Stokes were proposed by ad hoc arguments to describe the phenomena of heat conduction, diffusion, and shear stresses in fluids. This was before there was any non-equilibrium thermodynamics. It was much later—essentially when Eckart’s papers [1], [2], [3] appeared—that these laws became incorporated into thermodynamics of irreversible processes. That theory, while not entirely systematic, is simple and has great suggestive value. We start out with a brief description of how thermodynamics of irreversible processes arrives at the laws of Fourier and Navier-Stokes.