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Updated: June 18, 2025
They have thus arrived at numerical verifications which are entirely in conformity with the calculations of Maxwell. The existence of these pressures may be otherwise foreseen even apart from the electromagnetic theory, by adding to the theory of undulations the principles of thermodynamics.
That is to say, even if it governs the whole of our solar system, the law of the conservation of energy is concerned with the relationship of a fragment of this world to another fragment rather than with the nature of the whole. It is otherwise with the second principle of thermodynamics. The law of the degradation of energy does not bear essentially on magnitudes.
I don't know whether I can ever learn it all myself, but I'm going to the School of Engineering up at the University, next spring, to learn chemistry, and qualitative analysis, and calculus, and analytical mechanics, and graphical statics, and metallurgy, and thermodynamics, and hydraulics, and a lot of other things.
Certainly we can only bow before an hypothesis which enables us to group in the same synthesis all the discoveries on electric discharges and on radioactive substances, and which leads to a satisfactory theory of optics and of electricity; while by the intermediary of radiating heat it seems likely to embrace shortly the principles of thermodynamics also.
But the Ambassadeurs, and the Alcazar d'Ete and the Folies Marigny and Olympia and such-like stages where fame and fortune are to be found, will have none of him. Paris, too, gets on his vagabond nerves. But what is the good of presenting the unsophisticated public of Brest or Beziers with an imitation of Monsieur le Bargy? As well give them lectures on Thermodynamics.
We shall begin with Thermometry, or the registration of temperatures, and Calorimetry, or the measurement of quantities of heat. We shall then go on to Thermodynamics, which investigates the relations between the thermal properties of bodies and their other dynamical properties, in so far as these relations may be traced without any assumption as to the particular constitution of these bodies.
Just as, in elementary geometry, we can replace the postulate of Euclid by other equivalent propositions, so the postulate of thermodynamics is not necessarily fixed, and it is instructive to try to give it the most general and suggestive character. MM. Perrin and Langevin have made a successful attempt in this direction.
It is interesting to note that thermodynamics seems powerless to determine this equation, for it does not trouble itself about the nature of the bodies obedient to its laws; but, on the other hand, it intervenes to determine the properties of coexisting phases.
In whatever way you look at it, the principle of Carnot furnishes, in the immense majority of cases, a very sure guide in which physicists continue to have the most entire confidence. To apply the two fundamental principles of thermodynamics, various methods may be employed, equivalent in the main, but presenting as the cases vary a greater or less convenience.
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