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The ancient Greek understanding of physics was limited to the statics of simple machines (the balance of forces), and did not include dynamics or the concept of work. During the Renaissance the dynamics of the Mechanical Powers, as the simple machines were called, began to be studied from the standpoint of how far they could lift a load, in addition to the force they could apply, leading ...
Thermodynamic work is one of the principal kinds of process by which a thermodynamic system can interact with and transfer energy to its surroundings. This results in externally measurable macroscopic forces on the system's surroundings, which can cause mechanical work, to lift a weight, for example, [1] or cause changes in electromagnetic, [2] [3] [4] or gravitational [5] variables.
William Robert Grove c. 1850. In 1846, Grove published On The Correlation of Physical Forces [15] [16] in which he anticipated the general theory of the conservation of energy that was more famously put forward in Hermann von Helmholtz' Über die Erhaltung der Kraft (On the Conservation of Force) published the following year. [7]
Though a standardised value of 4.1860 J·cal −1 was established in the early 20th century, in the 1920s, it was ultimately realised that the constant is simply the specific heat of water, a quantity that varies with temperature between the values of 4.17 and 4.22 J·g −1 ·°C −1.
Conservation of energy was not established as a universal principle until it was understood that the energy of mechanical work can be dissipated into heat. [ 134 ] [ 135 ] With the concept of energy given a solid grounding, Newton's laws could then be derived within formulations of classical mechanics that put energy first, as in the Lagrangian ...
In thermodynamics, heat is energy in transfer between a thermodynamic system and its surroundings by modes other than thermodynamic work and transfer of matter. Such modes are microscopic, mainly thermal conduction, radiation, and friction, as distinct from the macroscopic modes, thermodynamic work and transfer of matter. [1]
Energy (from Ancient Greek ἐνέργεια (enérgeia) 'activity') is the quantitative property that is transferred to a body or to a physical system, recognizable in the performance of work and in the form of heat and light.
Like the maximum power theorem, Odum's statement of the maximum power principle relies on the notion of 'matching', such that high-quality energy maximizes power by matching and amplifying energy (1994, pp. 262, 541): "in surviving designs a matching of high-quality energy with larger amounts of low-quality energy is likely to occur" (1994, p ...