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Updated: June 18, 2025
Just as the physicist must hold hard by his principles of motion and thermodynamics and radiation and the like, so the sociologist must hold hard by the organic principles which determine the life and continuance of living things. Unless we base our projects for mankind upon the laws of life, they will come to naught, as such projects have come to naught not once but a thousand times in the past.
But if the principle thus enunciated by Helmholtz as a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics is at bottom identical with that discovered by Gibbs, it is more difficult of application and is presented under a more mysterious aspect.
This equation, called "Joule's equivalent," or 1 thermal unit = 772 foot-pounds, is the foundation and the corner-stone of thermodynamics. It is essential to understand the meaning of this equation.
The great enigma which it propounds to us, and which, like the riddle of the Sphinx, we will solve or be destroyed, is this: Has the increase in the potential of human power, through thermodynamics, been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the potential of human character?
He has endeavoured to rediscover, by starting with the fundamental hypothesis, the quantitative laws discovered by thermodynamics.
One day he was asked by the chief engineer of the concern to journey to New York, and read a paper before his engineering society at one of the regular annual meetings, on the subject of thermodynamics in its relation to the company's own product the turbine. He tipped over his chair in his eagerness to get out of the office and on the train. He realized the importance of this opportunity.
In time his work was brought to the attention of the chief engineer, and one day, when the president of the company, who was also an inventor of national repute and responsible for the design of the turbine being manufactured by the organization, wanted to make certain bold changes in the design, the chief engineer sent for the young engineer whose work in college in thermodynamics had won for him certain honors, with the result that our hero found himself presently seated opposite the president at a table in the latter's office, engaged in working out calculations on his slide-rule calculations beyond the powers of the president, because he was not a heavy theoretician.
Now, however, many physicists, continuing the classic researches of Kirchhoff, Boltzmann, Professors Wien and Planck, and taking their starting-point from the laws of thermodynamics, have given formulas which establish the radiating power of a dark body as a function of the temperature and the wave-length, or, better still, of the total power as a function of the temperature and wave-length corresponding to the maximum value of the power of radiation.
If we reject this hypothesis, it will then be allowable to introduce into thermodynamics laws previously excluded, and it will be possible to construct, as M. Duhem has done, a much more comprehensive theory. The ideas of M. Duhem have been illustrated by remarkable experimental work.
His watch, of course, was gone, but not, I am glad to say, his chain, which hung dangling, though in his flurry he had not noticed it. It made him look a trifle ridiculous. As he wore no tie-pin he had not lost that, and beyond his temper he had indeed lost nothing further save, possibly, a textbook upon Thermodynamics.
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