Force-driven interactions offer representation of energy in both reversible and
irreversible worlds. Heat is a different matter.
Heat phenomena only exists in an irreversible universe. Before the nineteenth
century, there was only the intuitive view that heat was something that caused a
temperature rise. I shall refer to this as heat. It is this heat, broadly understood, that
was studied by Black, Lavoisier, Carnot, Clapeyron, Mayer, Joule, Helmholtz,
Thomson, Rankine, and Clausius. Initially, each of them—like a blind man in the
parable of “blind men and the elephant”, apprehended one part or parts of its
manifold essences. The emergence of the MEH as an undisputed principle made it
into the privileged position as the “principal corner stone of classical thermodynamics,” [2] on which the substance theory of heat—that heat is a substance—was
vanquished. The conception of heat underwent a transformation too, to be encapsulated narrowly in terms of heat, Q, as the process of heat exchange.
In association with this transformation, there has been a mistaken attempt to treat
heat and work, Q and W, in Eq. (22) in parallel fashion by adopting the official
doctrine of forbidding the use of “the heat in a body.” It is a doctrine that physics
has not been able to enforce. For instance, in a 2004 paper Brookes, et al. [3]
reports: “When it comes to language about heat, there is consensus that physicists’
language can be misleading, but little agreement about why it is misleading or how
it can be corrected.” They concluded their study with the astonishing admission that
physicists talk about heat predominately as if it were a substance!
This astonishing admission was commented on in Table 3.1 and will be further
examined in greater detail in Sect. 5.6, which will conclude that the critique of
Brookes et al. was misdirected: when physicists talk about heat in a body, they
obviously talk about heat in the broader sense than heat as a process, i.e., heat
energy as a state function, with no implication of using the term to mean heat as a
substance.
The whole issue was a red herring resulting from the inability of providing a
concise definition of heat. As it will be presented in Sect. 5.6, a middle ground can
be found between the broadest meaning of heat and the narrowest interpretation of
heat (as heat exchange, Q, alone) by defining heat narrowly as a process and as a
state function corresponding to natural end states of spontaneous changes. Such a
definition serves how we intuitively use the term of heat as manifestation of irreversibility in nature.
Correspondingly, though force-driven interactions offer representation of energy
even in an irreversible world, force-driven interactions cannot explain how we use
energy because such uses depend on irreversibility in nature, which can be
explained only statistically. To put it in another way, energy conservation prevails
in both reversible and irreversible worlds but energy availability (see Sect. 4.7) is a
concept manifested only in irreversible worlds.
3.5 Irreversible Universe …
47
irreversible worlds. Heat is a different matter.
Heat phenomena only exists in an irreversible universe. Before the nineteenth
century, there was only the intuitive view that heat was something that caused a
temperature rise. I shall refer to this as heat. It is this heat, broadly understood, that
was studied by Black, Lavoisier, Carnot, Clapeyron, Mayer, Joule, Helmholtz,
Thomson, Rankine, and Clausius. Initially, each of them—like a blind man in the
parable of “blind men and the elephant”, apprehended one part or parts of its
manifold essences. The emergence of the MEH as an undisputed principle made it
into the privileged position as the “principal corner stone of classical thermodynamics,” [2] on which the substance theory of heat—that heat is a substance—was
vanquished. The conception of heat underwent a transformation too, to be encapsulated narrowly in terms of heat, Q, as the process of heat exchange.
In association with this transformation, there has been a mistaken attempt to treat
heat and work, Q and W, in Eq. (22) in parallel fashion by adopting the official
doctrine of forbidding the use of “the heat in a body.” It is a doctrine that physics
has not been able to enforce. For instance, in a 2004 paper Brookes, et al. [3]
reports: “When it comes to language about heat, there is consensus that physicists’
language can be misleading, but little agreement about why it is misleading or how
it can be corrected.” They concluded their study with the astonishing admission that
physicists talk about heat predominately as if it were a substance!
This astonishing admission was commented on in Table 3.1 and will be further
examined in greater detail in Sect. 5.6, which will conclude that the critique of
Brookes et al. was misdirected: when physicists talk about heat in a body, they
obviously talk about heat in the broader sense than heat as a process, i.e., heat
energy as a state function, with no implication of using the term to mean heat as a
substance.
The whole issue was a red herring resulting from the inability of providing a
concise definition of heat. As it will be presented in Sect. 5.6, a middle ground can
be found between the broadest meaning of heat and the narrowest interpretation of
heat (as heat exchange, Q, alone) by defining heat narrowly as a process and as a
state function corresponding to natural end states of spontaneous changes. Such a
definition serves how we intuitively use the term of heat as manifestation of irreversibility in nature.
Correspondingly, though force-driven interactions offer representation of energy
even in an irreversible world, force-driven interactions cannot explain how we use
energy because such uses depend on irreversibility in nature, which can be
explained only statistically. To put it in another way, energy conservation prevails
in both reversible and irreversible worlds but energy availability (see Sect. 4.7) is a
concept manifested only in irreversible worlds.
3.5 Irreversible Universe …
47