Skip to main content
Fachgebiete
Automobil + Motoren Bauwesen + Immobilien Business IT + Informatik Elektrotechnik + Elektronik Energie + Nachhaltigkeit Finance + Banking Management + Führung Marketing + Vertrieb Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe Versicherung + Risiko
DE
EN
Themenseiten
Organisationspsychologie Projektmanagement Marketing Smart Manufacturing
Bücher
Zeitschriften
Weitere Formate
Podcasts Webinare Technik Webinare Wirtschaft Kongresse Veranstaltungskalender Awards
Jetzt Einzelzugang starten
Zugang für Unternehmen
Referenzkunden
ATZ-Fachkongress

Chassis.tech plus 2024


4 Kongresse in einer Veranstaltung

Treffen Sie in München die Fachleute von Chassis, Lenkung, Bremsen sowie Reifen/Räder.
Erweiterte Suche
Anmelden
nach oben

1980 | Buch

The Producer’s Apology to the Spectators Kapitel lesen Erstes Kapitel lesen

The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics, 1822–1854

verfasst von: Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III

Verlag: Springer New York

Buchreihe : Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences

Enthalten in: Professional Book Archive

Einloggen, um Zugang zu erhalten
insite
SUCHEN

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter
1. The Producer’s Apology to the Spectators
Abstract
We are not such optimists as were our teachers and parents. We do not have to equate “progress” with every δf(t) if δt > 0, t being the time. In discussing the interplay between mathematics and physics1 I feel myself permitted, therefore, to select instead of fields of brilliant success like hydrodynamics, elasticity, and electromagnetism, one accursed by misunderstanding, irrelevance, retreat, and failure. Thus I write of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century. No-one will be surprised, consequently, by my use of a delta to define progress, since thermodynamics is the kingdom of deltas. However, the single 8 just used will suffice. In return, I bring the time back into its rightful, central place—a place it occupied at the start but from which it was wrongly driven by late authors who confused dynamics with statics.
Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III
2. The Common Inheritance
Abstract
On the basis of data from experiments regarding the compressibility of air at constant temperature collected by Boyle and interpreted by Towneley and Power, and of data from experiments at constant volume obtained and interpreted by Amontons and many later experimenters, especially Gay-Lussac and Dalton, by 1820 it was generally agreed that the pressure p, the volume V, and the temperature 6 of a body of aeriform fluid at rest obeyed the relation
$$[pV = R\theta ,\,\,\,\,\,\,\,\,\,\,R = const.$$
(2A.1)
Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III
3. Prologue: Laplace, Biot, and Poisson
Abstract
Urged by Citizen Laplace, Citizen Biot1 undertook “to examine the influence that the variations of temperature which accompany the dilatations and condensations of air might have on the speed of sound…. It is a fact known to the physicists that atmospheric air, when it is condensed, loses a part of its latent heat, which goes into the state of sensible heat, and on the contrary when it is rarefied, it takes back a portion of sensible heat, which it converts into latent heat.” The sonorous condensations must therefore be accompanied by changes of temperature. Since both of these are very small, “we shall regard them as proportional….” Thus Biot assumes that2
$$dot{\theta}=\beta \frac{\dot {\rho}}{\rho},$$
(3A.1)
ft being a coefficient to which he attributes no particular functional dependence. By use of (2C.2)a we conclude from (1) that3
$$[\dot p = \frac{{\partial p}}{{\partial \rho }}\dot \rho + kp\frac{{\dot \rho }}{\rho },$$
(3A.2)
Where
$$[k \equiv \frac{\beta }{p}\frac{{\partial p}}{{\partial \theta }} = \frac{\beta }{\theta },$$
(3A.3)
the latter expression being appropriate to an ideal gas. By (2B.1) we obtain for the speed of sound the relation
$$[c^2 = \frac{{\dot{p}}}{{\dot{\rho}}} = (1 + \frac{{kp}}{{\rho \frac{{\partial p}}{{\partial \rho }}}})\frac{{\partial p}}{{\partial \rho }},$$
(3A.4)
which for an ideal gas reduces to
$$[c^2 = (1 + k)\frac{p}{\rho }.$$
(3A.5)
Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III
4. Act I. Workless Dissipation: Fourier
Abstract
Lambert in his Pyrometrie1 seems to have been the first man to attempt a precise treatment of the conduction of heat. He considered a long bar open to the air, resting upon thin wires, and with one end in a fire. “Thus the bar is heated at one end only. The heat penetrates by and by into the more distant parts but finally passes out through each part into the air. If the fire is maintained long enough and with equal heat, finally every part of the bar contains a certain degree of heat because it again and again receives just as much heat from the parts lying nearer to the fire as it communicates to the more distant ones and to the air.” [As Mach2 remarked, Lambert’s analysis does not exhibit clarity corresponding to this description of the physical problem.] Lambert regards the “heat” y as a function of position x alone and writes down the expression for the subtangent J to the corresponding curve:
$$dy:y = dx:J.$$
(4A.1)
Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III
5. Act II. Dissipationless Work: Carnot
Abstract
In 1824, two years after the long delayed printing of Fourier’s theory of heat in its final form, appeared Carnot’s booklet called Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, and on Machines Fitted to Develop that Power1. [Little of any consequence regarding this subject was then known. Anyone skeptical here need not resort to the writings of engineers, inventors, and constructors. Just eight years before Carnot’s work was published, a leading physicist2 of the day could give his readers in a whole chapter on steam engines no more than an illustrated description of the machines, embellished by a few scientific terms and some numerical data regarding them, followed by a sketch of their evolution during the preceding 111 years, and finish with a discussion of how much work a horse of mean strength can do in a day.
Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III
6. Distracting Interlude: Clapeyron and Duhamel
Abstract
The theory of Carnot was taken up by Clapeyron in a memoir1 published in 1834. While CLAPEYRON (§I) hails “the idea which serves as a basis of [Carnot’s] researches” as being “both fertile and beyond question”, he deplores Carnot’s preference for “avoiding the use of mathematical analysis” in favor of “a chain of difficult and elusive arguments” so as to arrive at “results which can be deduced easily from a more general law.”
Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III
7. Act III. Equivalence, Conservation, Interconvertibility: When and of What?
Abstract
That heat could sometimes cause mechanical effect, and much of it, had been known since the disaster that befel Strepsiades while he was cooking the haggis for the feast of Zeus, but apparently it was the sooty proliferation of the steam engine in the early nineteenth century that first roused physicists to pay much attention to the phenomenon. As Carnot had seen, and as Clapeyron had made widely known, by absorbing and emitting heat a given body undergoing a cyclic process may do a definite amount of work, and by doing work cyclically a body may absorb and emit definite amounts of heat. Certain ideal bodies, described by the theory of calorimetry, give out in undergoing the reverse of a given process the heat they would gain and the work they would do in the given process.
Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III
8. Act IV. Internal Energy: the First Paper of Clausius. Entropy: the First Paper of Rankine
Abstract
After quoting Carnot’s claim that to deny the existence of the heat function “would overthrow the whole theory of heat”, Clausius wrote1:
I am not aware, however, that it has been sufficiently proved by experiment that no loss of heat occurs when work is done; it may, perhaps, on the contrary, be asserted with more correctness that even if such a loss has not been proved directly, it has yet been shown by other facts to be not only admissible, but even highly probable. If it be assumed that heat, like a substance, cannot diminish in quantity, it must also be assumed that it cannot increase. It is, however, almost impossible to explain the heat produced by friction except as an increase in the quantity of heat. The careful investigations of Joule, in which heat is produced in several different ways by the application of mechanical work, have almost certainly proved not only the possibility of increasing the quantity of heat in any circumstances but also the law that the quantity of heat developed is proportional to the work expended in the operation. To this it must be added that other facts have lately become known which support the view, that heat is not a substance, but consists in a motion of the least parts of bodies. If this view is correct, it is admissible to apply to heat the general mechanical principle that a motion may be transformed into work, and in such a manner that the loss of vis viva is proportional to the work accomplished.
Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III
9. Distracting Interlude: Explosion of Print
Abstract
Rankine’s response1 to Clausius’ first paper was a [characteristically forthright and generous] “Fifth section” adjoined to his own first paper:
(40.)
Carnôt was the first to assert the law, that the ratio of the maximum mechanical effect, to the whole heat expended in an expansive machine, is a function solely of the two temperatures at which the heat is respectively received and emitted, and is independent of the nature of the working substance. But his investigations not being based on the principle of the dynamical convertibility of heat, involve the fallacy that power can be produced out of nothing.
 
Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III
10. Schismatic Act V. Antiplot in a Dark and Empty Theatre: Reech’s Discovery and Burial of a Too General Theory, and His Failure to Reduce It
Abstract
[In §9C the spectators have been warned of the impending deluge1 from the pen of Reech. They have been told also that Reech was setting about to determine the consequences of the first principles of the subject.] Reech, mentioning the Works of Carnot, Clapeyron, Joule, Thomson, Rankine, Mayer, and Clausius, expresses the opinion (p. 357) that “too much importance has been given to pure hypotheses, losing sight of the logical train of reasoning of Mr. Carnot, which has not been broken, I think, by Mr. Regnault’s objection, and which needs only to be completed from a new point of view.” Reech himself adopts “the mother idea or fundamental axiom of the reasonings of Messrs. Carnot and Clapeyron” (p. 364) but refuses to accept either their assumption that the heat in a body is a function of V and θ or the new assumptions connecting heat with work which Mayer, Joule, Clausius, Rankine, and Kelvin had espoused. For Reech, the first principles are these:
1.
For a given gas, through each point of the V-p quadrant passes one and only one isotherm and one and only one adiabat. [He assumes tacitly that they decussate.]
 
2.
Carnot’s General Axiom: The work L(b) done by a fluid body in undergoing a Carnot cycle b is determined by its operating temperatures θ+ and θ− and by the heat absorbed C+(b) on the isotherm at the higher temperature θ+. That work is the same in all Carnot cycles that can correspond to the three quantities θ+, θ−, and C+(b).
 
Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III
11. Orthodox Act V. Kelvin’s Absolute Temperatures. Clausius’ Second Paper: Irreversibility and Oracling
Abstract
In 1852 Kelvin1 had presented his ideas on irreversible processes, which he claimed to be “necessary consequences” of his “axiom” about “inanimate material agency” (above, §9B).
Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III
12. Epilogue: Götterdämmerung
Abstract
Clausius’ first paper, while entangled and slack, was in aim and result constructive. From his second paper, on the contrary, through the murk and gloom emerges a growing aura of retreat and impending failure. While in all work analysed up to now there was no hint that conditions were any more specific than the equations themselves suggested, in this paper Clausius assumes that “the pressure always changes very gradually,” though he specifies no time scale sufficient to give meaning to the term “gradual”. Here the tergiverse “quasistatic process”, hinted at by Reech, first slithers onto the scene. It joins the “state” as a principal engine of the mystic double-talk that makes thermodynamics different in kind from all the rest of classical physics.
Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III
Backmatter
Metadaten
Titel
The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics, 1822–1854
verfasst von
Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III
Copyright-Jahr
1980
Verlag
Springer New York
Electronic ISBN
978-1-4613-9444-0
Print ISBN
978-1-4613-9446-4
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-9444-0