Essay on Thermodynamics

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History

The first established principle of thermodynamics (which eventually became the Second Law) was formulated by Sadi Carnot in 1824. By 1860, as found in the works of those such as Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson, there were two established "principles" of thermodynamics, the first principle and the second principle. As the years passed, these principles turned into "laws." By 1873, for example, thermodynamicist Josiah Willard Gibbs, in his “Graphical Methods in the Thermodynamics of Fluids”, clearly stated that there were two absolute laws of thermodynamics, a first law and a second law.

Over the last 80 years or so, occasionally, various writers have suggested adding Laws, but none of them have been widely accepted. …show more content…
In brief, this postulates that entropy is temperature dependent and leads to the formulation of the idea of absolute zero.

This has been summed up as "You Can't Even Stay Out Of The Game".

[edit] Tentative fourth laws or principles

In the late 19th century, thermodynamicist Ludwig Boltzmann argued that the fundamental object of contention in the life-struggle in the evolution of the organic world is 'available energy'. Since then, over the years, various thermodynamic researchers have come forward to ascribe to or to postulate potential fourth laws of thermodynamics; in some cases, even fifth or sixth laws of thermodynamics are proposed. The majority of these tentative fourth law statements are attempts to apply thermodynamics to evolution. Most fourth law statements, however, are speculative and far from agreed upon.

The most commonly proposed Fourth Law is the Onsager reciprocal relations. Another example is the maximum power principle as put forward initially by biologist Alfred Lotka in his 1922 article Contributions to the Energetics of Evolution.[1] Most variations of hypothetical fourth laws (or principles) have to do with the environmental sciences, biological evolution, or galactic phenomena.[2]

[edit] Extended interpretations

The laws of thermodynamics are sometimes interpreted to have a wider
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