Thanks for the compliment!
I think it would be cool if that was taught as a lesson in a physics class. This stuff is more interesting then the daily grind of being an engineer. But I suppose that is what I'm suppose to be doing right now! Gotta go.
I really enjoyed the part of Carnot's paper that made an analogy with the Paddle wheel. (I can wrap my engineer brain around that one!) For the heck of it, I did my own calculations showing the analogy. No integrals or statistical equations! Just some really basic undergraduate stuff.
The...
Yes it does. Thanks for the reference. The last sentence that refers to
"The discrepancy from the true value, 427 kilogrammetres per kilocalorie, is due merely to
errors in the experimental data."
and that sort of fills me in on what I was trying to grasp. Namely that through the use...
Andy,
Thanks for the response. Interesting analysis and one that will take me some time to digest. I've been out of school for decades now, so I'll have to open up the old math closets in my brain to pull in that one.
Maybe I'm over-simplifying this but in Carnot's paper when he talked...
Thanks Andy. Good luck on science day.
That was some useful insight but it seems to me that the use of measured specific heats and calculation of the caloric with the integral doesn't come up with the most efficient and therefore maximum work that is possible for a given heat input and...
Andy,
Thanks for posting that excerpt and for your commentary. There are three things that stick out to me. One is that the analogy that Carnot used with a waterfall is brilliant. Quantity of water with energy (although he didn't call it that) and height with temperature difference...
I look forward to it. Thanks.
Edited to add:. Andy, when you are talking about the formulation of the 2nd law in terms of thermodynamics is this what you are referring to below? I copied this from Wikipedia and is a formulation of the rate of change of entropy in an open system with flow...
That was interesting thanks. I have seen some discussions of the differences between thermostatics and thermodynamics. I have also seen a discussion on deriving the thermostatic definition from statistics, but although I get the idea, I have not rigorously grasped it.
However, I am an...
I am new here and have always loved the history of science as much as the science itself. I have been intrigued by the 2nd law of thermodynamics and entropy for a long time but have also had something about its evolution that bothered me. So I'll summarize its stated development from my...