Equilibrium Thermodynamics

Abstract

Since the industrial revolution, the story of technology, which has underpinned civilisation’s physical development, has largely been a saga of rapidly expanding exploitation of the power of the sun—but not unfortunately, the power gifted by current sunlight, but the power derived from ‘ancient sunlight’ in the form of energy stored in the fossilised deposits of the flora and fauna of primordial forests. Mankind has, for the past 200 years, been burning this ‘ancient sunlight’, in the form of coal, oil and gas, as if there was no tomorrow. The urge evinced by entrepreneurs, assisted by scientists and engineers, to make best use of this buried energy, initially through the agency of steam and then through the direct combustion of oil and gas, led to the science of thermodynamics. The development of the laws of thermodynamics, which form the basis of the subdivision of the topic dealing with equilibrium systems, is reviewed here.

The second law giveth, and the second law taketh away.

E.D. Schneider & D. Sagan

You all know how powerful and varied are the effects of which steam engines are capable; with them has really begun the great development of industry which has characterised our century before all others.

Hermann von Helmholtz