Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Lord Kelvin. It is believed the "PNP" in his signature stands for "Professor of Natural Philosophy". Kelvin also wrote under the pseudonym "P. Q. R." William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin was a British mathematician, mathematical physicist and engineer. [7][8] Born in Belfast, he was the professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow ...
Lord Kelvin originated the idea of universal heat death in 1852. In 1852, Thomson published On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy , in which he outlined the rudiments of the second law of thermodynamics summarized by the view that mechanical motion and the energy used to create that motion will naturally tend ...
The heat death paradox, also known as thermodynamic paradox, Clausius' paradox, and Kelvin's paradox, [ 1] is a reductio ad absurdum argument that uses thermodynamics to show the impossibility of an infinitely old universe. It was formulated in February 1862 by Lord Kelvin and expanded upon by Hermann von Helmholtz and William John Macquorn ...
The second law of thermodynamics may be expressed in many specific ways, [25] the most prominent classical statements [26] being the statement by Rudolf Clausius (1854), the statement by Lord Kelvin (1851), and the statement in axiomatic thermodynamics by Constantin Carathéodory (1909). These statements cast the law in general physical terms ...
The vortex theory of the atom was a 19th-century attempt by William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) to explain why the atoms recently discovered by chemists came in only relatively few varieties but in very great numbers of each kind. Based on the idea of stable, knotted vortices in the ether or aether, it contributed an important mathematical legacy.
The history of thermodynamics is a fundamental strand in the history of physics, the history of chemistry, and the history of science in general. Due to the relevance of thermodynamics in much of science and technology, its history is finely woven with the developments of classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, magnetism, and chemical kinetics, to more distant applied fields such as ...
Thermodynamics is a branch of physics that deals with heat, work, and temperature, and their relation to energy, entropy, and the physical properties of matter and radiation. The behavior of these quantities is governed by the four laws of thermodynamics, which convey a quantitative description using measurable macroscopic physical quantities ...
The 19th century British scientist Lord Kelvin first developed and proposed the scale. [5] It was often called the "absolute Celsius" scale in the early 20th century. [6] The kelvin was formally added to the International System of Units in 1954, defining 273.16 K to be the triple point of water.