Abstract
A presupposition in the naturalistic sciences is that laws should be centered on a natural object in itself without having to involve a man-made machine. That is the legacy of Newtonian science of mechanical objects as mass bodies. A strong movement in equilibrium thermodynamics initiated by Caratheodory has been based on this presupposition. This disquisition rejects naturalistic presupposition and the Caratheodory formalism by pointing out the unique nature of thermodynamic objects as systems with essential design characteristics. This chapter applies Prigogine’s modern formalism for the effective treatment of system–surroundings interactions for a better understanding of thermodynamic processes.
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Notes
- 1.
Uffink famously in Ref. [1] made this characterization of CKP, “the unargued statements of Kelvin, the bold claims of Clausius and the strained attempts of Planck.” While CKP may not be perfect in their logic or elegance (there is an opinion that P’s logic is better than that of C and K), their scientific judgment is superior in my mind to that of Caratheodory and Uffink. Certainly, their scientific legacy supports this opinion.
- 2.
I use the term here somewhat like reductionism to mean the position that any concept that is not in the governing equations of physics such as purpose, action, or the operation of thermal machines has no scientific meaning.
- 3.
In the article, Coveney [17] wrote
From an epistemological viewpoint, the contributions of Prigogine’s Brussels School are unquestionably of signal importance. The myth of a completely timeless, deterministic Universe is henceforth replaced by a world in which static affairs are enlarged to embrace the probabilistic kinetics of process; in which reversibility and irreversibility are accorded equal objectivity; and in which the notions of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ are unified within a single conceptual framework. (p. 414)
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Wang, LS. (2020). Reversible Processes Versus Quasi-static Processes, and the Condition of Internal Reversibility. In: A Treatise of Heat and Energy. Mechanical Engineering Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05746-6_6
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