Have you ever experienced that wondrous “Eureka!” moment of insight when you’ve discovered some hidden secret of nature? Archimedes did when he realized that the volume of water displaced is equal to the volume of the body submerged. KekulĂ© did when discovered benzene’s structure. Hubble did when he discovered that the stars are all movingContinue reading “The Road to Entropy – Clausius undaunted”
Tag Archives: cornwall
The Road to Entropy – Sadi Carnot’s use of analogy to create his “flawed” masterpiece (video)
The commercialization of the high-pressure steam engines by the Cornish Engineers of Britain inspired Sadi Carnot, a French military engineer, to analyze these engines and seek the theories to guide their improvement. If you’re interested in doing a deep dive into Sadi Carnot’s work, here are two excellent references. I go into much more depthContinue reading “The Road to Entropy – Sadi Carnot’s use of analogy to create his “flawed” masterpiece (video)”
The Road to Entropy – Phil Hosken on Richard Trevithick and the invention of the high-pressure steam engine (video)
As shared in my previous post (here), the historical road to entropy started with Denis Papin’s development of the piston-in-cylinder assembly and Thomas Newcomen’s and James Watt’s subsequent efforts to commercialize and continuously improve fire engines or atmospheric engines built around this assembly. Steam at atmospheric pressure was employed in these engines, not as aContinue reading “The Road to Entropy – Phil Hosken on Richard Trevithick and the invention of the high-pressure steam engine (video)”