Where was 2LoT discovered?

[CTD]

For now, the title says it all. I have a simple, straightforward question: Where was the Second Law of Thermodynamics discovered?

[CTD]

I suppose I should clarify that I'm not looking for a specific address. A very broad answer will suffice, so long as folks agree about its correctness. You could miss by half a continent, and no harm would be done.

[Marshall]

CTD, I would very much like to see you propose an answer to your own question.

Have a look at this article about Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Clausius

Then, if you would please, indulge me by suggesting an answer that we can consider.

==============================

To me your question sounds fishy. I do not think of physical theories as being "discovered".

I would not say "Einstein discovered the Law of General Relativity in 1915."

One often hears it remarked that the Standard Model of particle physics is the most successful theory in the history of physics. It is never referred to as a "LAW"
and it is not said to have been "DISCOVERED".

Physics theories are "thought up", devised, proposed, published, tested by observation. They are human artifacts that people formulate and then TRY OUT to see how well they work.

I cannot think of any physics proposed after 1900 that is called a LAW.

We describe 19th Century physics in terms of Laws for historical reasons (because the authors spoke in those terms) otherwise we might say something like this:

"Clausius defined the concept of entropy around 1850. This allowed him to formulate the second principle of thermodynamics in a more or less modern form."

I'm not expert in the history of the subject. That's probably roughly right but someone more versed in the history of thermodynamics may want to corret me on details.

[Ursa Minimus]

I'm not expert in the history of the subject. That's probably roughly right but someone more versed in the history of thermodynamics may want to corret me on details.

I am certainly no expert, but this seems to lay out the various steps along the way (relatively) concisely, showing many people and many places over many years were involved in the development:

http://www.wolframscience.com/reference/notes/1019b

But in the 1700s it became widely believed that heat was instead a separate fluid-like substance. Experiments by James Joule and others in the 1840s put this in doubt, and finally in the 1850s it became accepted that heat is in fact a form of energy. The relation between heat and energy was important for the development of steam engines, and in 1824 Sadi Carnot had captured some of the ideas of thermodynamics in his discussion of the efficiency of an idealized engine. Around 1850 Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson (Kelvin) stated both the First Law - that total energy is conserved - and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law was originally formulated in terms of the fact that heat does not spontaneously flow from a colder body to a hotter. Other formulations followed quickly , and Kelvin in particular understood some of the law’s general implications. The idea that gases consist of molecules in motion had been discussed in some detail by Daniel Bernoulli in 1738, but had fallen out of favor, and was revived by Clausius in 1857. Following this, James Clerk Maxwell in 1860 derived from the mechanics of individual molecular collisions the expected distribution of molecular speeds in a gas. Over the next several years the kinetic theory of gases developed rapidly, and many macroscopic properties of gases in equilibrium were computed. In 1872 Ludwig Boltzmann constructed an equation that he thought could describe the detailed time development of a gas, whether in equilibrium or not. In the 1860s Clausius had introduced entropy as a ratio of heat to temperature, and had stated the Second Law in terms of the increase of this quantity. Boltzmann then showed that his equation implied the so-called H Theorem, which states that a quantity equal to entropy in equilibrium must always increase with time.

...

Nevertheless, by the 1930s, the Second Law had somehow come to be generally regarded as a principle of physics whose foundations should be questioned only as a curiosity.

[CTD]

CTD, I would very much like to see you propose an answer to your own question.

Have a look at this article about Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Clausius

Then, if you would please, indulge me by suggesting an answer that we can consider.

==============================

To me your question sounds fishy. I do not think of physical theories as being "discovered".

I would not say "Einstein discovered the Law of General Relativity in 1915."

One often hears it remarked that the Standard Model of particle physics is the most successful theory in the history of physics. It is never referred to as a "LAW"
and it is not said to have been "DISCOVERED".

Physics theories are "thought up", devised, proposed, published, tested by observation. They are human artifacts that people formulate and then TRY OUT to see how well they work.

I cannot think of any physics proposed after 1900 that is called a LAW.

We describe 19th Century physics in terms of Laws for historical reasons (because the authors spoke in those terms) otherwise we might say something like this:

"Clausius defined the concept of entropy around 1850. This allowed him to formulate the second principle of thermodynamics in a more or less modern form."

I'm not expert in the history of the subject. That's probably roughly right but someone more versed in the history of thermodynamics may want to corret me on details.

No need for double talk. I'm not here shopping for quack-a-mamy jibber-blabber conflating theories & laws either, nor yet for justifications for such knowledge-denying gimmicks.

There is a Law governing the behavior of things within our universe known as 'the Second Law of Thermodynamics'. I perceive that nobody desires to discuss it, even to confess it has been discovered. That is understandable, all things considered. It is an extremely valuable Law, which has led to more innovations and further discoveries than anyone could conveniently number. That it should be locally eschewed can hardly be surprising to the experienced.

For now, I shall maintain this law was discovered somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Let's just see how many aspire to dispute me, huh?

[CTD]

Okay, I see the viewcount's increased quite a bit, and nobody's undertaken to dispute the location of the discovery having been the Northern Hemisphere.

I am emboldened. I shall now narrow things a bit and say it was in the Northern hemisphere somewhere east of Chicago and west of Tokyo. Surely that's too certainly true to go unchallenged...

[CanadysPeak]

Okay, I see the viewcount's increased quite a bit, and nobody's undertaken to dispute the location of the discovery having been the Northern Hemisphere.

I am emboldened. I shall now narrow things a bit and say it was in the Northern hemisphere somewhere east of Chicago and west of Tokyo. Surely that's too certainly true to go unchallenged...

The earliest known formulation may be found in the unpublished notebooks of Sadi Carnot. The exact time is uncertain, yet he published an incorrect formulation in 1824, Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu et sur les machines propres à développer cette puissance, and died in 1832, so we may think it to have been in the period 1824 to 1832. From all accounts, Carnot remained in France during that period, residing most of the time in Paris, but posted briefly to Lyon and Auxonne. It is unclear which biographer "discovered" Carnot's further work, so we cannot date nor locate that event.

[CTD]

The earliest known formulation may be found in the unpublished notebooks of Sadi Carnot. The exact time is uncertain, yet he published an incorrect formulation in 1824, Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu et sur les machines propres à développer cette puissance, and died in 1832, so we may think it to have been in the period 1824 to 1832. From all accounts, Carnot remained in France during that period, residing most of the time in Paris, but posted briefly to Lyon and Auxonne. It is unclear which biographer "discovered" Carnot's further work, so we cannot date nor locate that event.

Wow thanks.

Now people, I think we can all agree the Second Law of Thermodynamics was discovered on Earth.




Right?





Can't we?



Are you sure now? I know some of you don't really, really want to admit it.





Why? Well it's standard spiel, well known: "The Second Law of Thermodynamics does not apply on Earth because the Earth is an open system." That's not just the common vandals' stand-by, either. That's a PhD-sportin' Evopusher's defense.

Check out some of these Google results & see
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&cli ... d=0CAcQgwM

Talk about an intellect-insultin' lie!

[CanadysPeak]

The earliest known formulation may be found in the unpublished notebooks of Sadi Carnot. The exact time is uncertain, yet he published an incorrect formulation in 1824, Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu et sur les machines propres à développer cette puissance, and died in 1832, so we may think it to have been in the period 1824 to 1832. From all accounts, Carnot remained in France during that period, residing most of the time in Paris, but posted briefly to Lyon and Auxonne. It is unclear which biographer "discovered" Carnot's further work, so we cannot date nor locate that event.

Wow thanks.

Now people, I think we can all agree the Second Law of Thermodynamics was discovered on Earth.




Right?





Can't we?



Are you sure now? I know some of you don't really, really want to admit it.





Why? Well it's standard spiel, well known: "The Second Law of Thermodynamics does not apply on Earth because the Earth is an open system." That's not just the common vandals' stand-by, either. That's a PhD-sportin' Evopusher's defense.

Check out some of these Google results & see
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&cli ... d=0CAcQgwM

Talk about an intellect-insultin' lie!

You're misunderstanding, or misquoting, what people say. The second law does not fully apply to earth because it is not a fully closed system; it certainly applies on earth. We all own and use many reasonably closed systems. I have a thermos in my cupboard that keeps coffee hot for two days.

[CTD]

You're misunderstanding, or misquoting, what people say. The second law does not fully apply to earth because it is not a fully closed system; it certainly applies on earth. We all own and use many reasonably closed systems. I have a thermos in my cupboard that keeps coffee hot for two days.

You're just slingin' mud, hopin' to minimize the damage to your precious lie. I have been an evolutionologist for over ten years, and I do very well know what these liars say. Better'n YOU!

[CanadysPeak]

You're misunderstanding, or misquoting, what people say. The second law does not fully apply to earth because it is not a fully closed system; it certainly applies on earth. We all own and use many reasonably closed systems. I have a thermos in my cupboard that keeps coffee hot for two days.

You're just slingin' mud, hopin' to minimize the damage to your precious lie. I have been an evolutionologist for over ten years, and I do very well know what these liars say. Better'n YOU!

Take a deep breath and count to ten. You're over-reacting. I sometimes sling mud, but only when I am fishing for a reaction. That is not the case here. I have no "precious lie" to defend. I am little more than an addlepated old engineer who owns a damn good thermos. To my rather simplified mind, that thermos demonstrates the efficacy of the second law. That thermos is on Earth. Again, I am rather a simple thinker, but that satisfies me that the second law applies on Earth.

You say that you are an "evolutionologist." I don't know what that is, but I suspect that you might be using entropy to somehow form a judgement about evolution. I urge you to begin any consideration of entropy from the maths rather than from the philosophical implication.

[Marshall]

This could become an interesting thread. You (Ursa, Canady...) brought some valuable historical detail, and a clearer perspective about the Second Law.

To go along with normal usage, I like calling it a "Law" too, even though it's no longer fashionable to call new physics by that name. Apologies for being over-cautious and seeming to quibble.

Does anybody recall from chemical kinetics how the Second Law drives many chemical reactions? There will be some reversible reaction and it tends to go in the direction where the products are in low concentration for some reason. To the extent that life is based on a bunch of chemical reactions, it could be said to be driven by the Second Law.

Life (and of course evolution) RUN not on energy exactly but on the degradation of high-grade energy into lower-grade energy. One hears it said that life and evolution run on "negative entropy"

Because apparently that is what drives the key reactions.

A leaf absorbs high-grade photons (visible spectrum) and then radiates and conducts off approximately the same amount of joules but as low-grade photons (infrared) and air-temperature heat.

And in the process of degrading the sun's high quality energy the leaf manages to rearrange a lot of atoms in highly unlikely configurations such as sugar and oxygen.

And then a hummingbird takes the negative entropy of those unlikely molecules of sugar and oxygen and lives (by degrading them back to CO2 and H2O) and in the process of living takes part in the evolution of that very unlikely small bird species with a long tongue, called a hummingbird.

It seems that the Second Law is driving this whole process.
And the net effect is that highgrade energy from the sun comes in to Earth and the Earth re-radiates back out into space the same amount of energy, but at longer (infrared) wavelengths.
I guess everybody knows this, just to different degrees of clarity. I'm a little vague about how it works---chemical kinetics, Gibbs free energy, and all that---and I'd welcome some more competent explanation of how the Second Law drives the evolution of complex life forms. Or anything like that. Second Law is cool.

Come to think of it, physical law in general is. It's a thought that we share with other sentient beings in the Galaxy, if there are any.

[Marshall]

Akouste Iones! To Nomos tou kosmou sou enas Nomos monos!

Hear, O Ionians, the Law of your cosmos is one Law. ;-D

Basically it was Anaximander (6th century BCE) and his contemporaries who gave us the idea of finding natural explanations for what happens in a lawful universe. He figured out that land creatures evolved from sea creatures and that the Earth doesn't sit on anything but has space and stars and stuff all around it. He believed that rain was made by evaporation and condensation rather than by Zeus. In case anyone's interested, here's a book about him and his times:
http://www.amazon.com/The-First-Scienti ... 005NI3BWI/

[john-sensei]

To go along with normal usage, I like calling it a "Law" too, even though it's no longer fashionable to call new physics by that name. Apologies for being over-cautious and seeming to quibble.

In physics, we unfortunately throw the word "law" around in different ways. "Ohm's Law", for example, is merely a common material property. Some materials obey it, others don't.

On the other hand, the First Law of Thermodynamics is quite fundamental. Through Noether's Theorem, we can recognize it as a consequence of the idea that physics itself does not change with time. We really don't know how to deal with apparent changes in physics except by reference to some kind of energy. Thus, given accelerating Hubble expansion, we invoke "dark energy".

But the Second Law is neither a conditionally applicable functional relationship, nor a universal symmetry/conservation principle. It's really the most peculiar proposition in physics, a universal denial of symmetry and conservation. In that it's unique. I think that most physicists wish it could be derivative of more comfortable physics, as Boltzmann attempted to establish with his "H Theorem". But that isn't a true theorem. Of course we still talk about the H Theorem because it works, despite its falsity. Go figure.

I'd welcome some more competent explanation of how the Second Law drives the evolution of complex life forms. Or anything like that. Second Law is cool.

The Second Law drives all processes where the future is qualitatively different from the past. Darwinian evolution is one of them. But so is stellar evolution, birth and death, or just spilling your beer. You can't get that from other fundamental physics: in Schrödinger's equation, for example, the future of a wave function is just as accessible as its past. Entropy is conserved by Schrödinger's equation, but the Second Law insists that it cannot be conserved.

[Marshall]

OK, I like the way you put it! Now I want to try to imagine HOW the second law drives life: I eat some chocolate icecream and I go for a walk up the steep hill behind campus. After I do this there is the same amount of energy as before---just in different forms. There is less sugar energy in the carton of icecream and it is balanced by more lowgrade heat energy in the air on the hillside where I huffed and puffed up the trail.

What got me up the hill was the Second Law.

Because chemical reactions can REVERSE unless the energy released as heat is dissipated.

The Second Law dissipates the heat of reaction so that it can't sit there and force the reaction to go backwards. So I can rely on my cells to metabolize sugar using oxygen I breathe and to convert ADP to ATP and use the ATP to do various things having to do with keeping me alive and getting me up the hill.

And the reactions will not suddenly start going backwards on me and using CO2 and H2O to make sugar and oxygen, because the Second Law has quickly diluted and degraded whatever would have allowed my metabolism to reverse. So it is actually a big help in keeping me alive. It keeps the chain of reactions going the right way.

Would anyone like to elaborate? Or run thru another example?

[flannel jesus]

From my limited perspective, I'm kinda of the opinion that calling it a Law is a bit of a misnomer -- it's really just statistics. I intuitively came to that conclusion, partly based on conversations I had, partly based on just thinking about hypotheticals -- Maxwell's Demon for example -- and I of course yield that my relatively uninformed intuition is by no means trustworthy or anything, but that is at least my present position.

Phrased in other words -- if we were somehow able to find the actual algorithms that the universe itself uses to calculate state2 given state1, I don't think that any of those algorithms would directly imply the 2nd Law, but I do think that those algorithms in function would tend to produce a universe which tends to appear as though the 2nd Law is true. It's kinda similar to Evolution in that sense -- there is no law in the universe specifically stating that life should evolve, I don't think anybody thinks there is. It's a statistical certainty, but it's not a "law" as such.

Here's one post that may explain better than I could the thought process about the 2nd Law as statistical certainty.

The reason I think this point is important, if it is true, is that it seems to be the major problem the OP was having with the 2nd Law -- that it is a LAW. "There is a Law governing the behavior of things within our universe known as 'the Second Law of Thermodynamics'." That's what he said in a previous post. If my intuition is right, then I do think it's important to point out that there is no such law governing behavior -- it is statistically certain that matter will tend to behave as the 2nd Law suggests, but the 2nd Law isn't actually part of the algorithms used by the universe, just as Evolution isn't.

I'd love to be corrected on anything I got wrong, I'd like to learn more about this. All this just comes from my own understanding and limited reading.

[john-sensei]

Phrased in other words -- if we were somehow able to find the actual algorithms that the universe itself uses to calculate state2 given state1, I don't think that any of those algorithms would directly imply the 2nd Law, but I do think that those algorithms in function would tend to produce a universe which tends to appear as though the 2nd Law is true. It's kinda similar to Evolution in that sense -- there is no law in the universe specifically stating that life should evolve, I don't think anybody thinks there is. It's a statistical certainty, but it's not a "law" as such.

Well, that's Boltzmann's approach: his "H Theorem" is exactly what you're working toward here. The scandal is that while it's fine physics (it works in the real world), it's bad math. That's a bit puzzling.