"Sadi’s pamphlet finds its way into the hands of... Rudolf Clausius. It is he who grasps the fundamental issue at stake, formulating a law that was destined to become famous: if nothing else around it changes, heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one. ...[A] ball may fall, but it can also come back up, by rebounding... Heat cannot. This is the only basic law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future. None of the others do. Not Newton's laws governing... mechanics... not the equations for electricity and magnatism... by Maxwell. Not Einstein's on relativistic gravity, nor those of quantum mechanics... by Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Dirac. Not those for elementary particles... by twentieth-century physicists. Not one of these distinguishes... past from... future. If a sequence of events is allowed by these equations, so is the same sequence run backward in time."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (2018) 2. Loss of Direction. Where Does the Eternal Current Come From?
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rudolf_Clausius
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Rudolf Clausius
Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius (2 January 1822 –24 August 1888) was a German physicist and mathematician. He is considered one of the founders of the science of thermodynamics. By his restatement of Sadi Carnot's principle known as the Carnot cycle, he provided a more fundamental foundation for the theory of heat. His most important paper, On the Moving Force of Heat (1850) was first to declare the second law of thermodynamics. He introduced the concept of entropy in 1865, and the virial theorem
52 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Rudolf Clausius →
Related Quotes
"The steam-engine having furnished us with a means of converting heat into a motive power, and our thoughts being ther…"
"Carnot proves that whenever work is produced by heat... a... quantity of heat passes from a warm body to... cold... […"
"The careful experiments of Joule, who developed heat... by the application of mechanical force, establish... not only…"
"[M]any facts.. lately transpired... tend to overthrow the hypothesis that heat is... a body, and to prove that it con…"
"[M]any facts have lately transpired which tend to overthrow the hypothesis that heat is itself a body, and to prove t…"
"[T]he new theory is opposed, not to the real fundamental principle of Carnot, but to the addition "no heat is lost;" …"
"I. Deductions from the principle of the equivalence of heat and work. We shall forbear entering... on the nature of t…"
"[T]he entire quantity of heat, Q, absorbed by the gas during a change of volume and temperature may be decomposed int…"
"In my memoir "On the Moving Force of Heat, &c." I have shown that the theorem of the equivalence of heat and work, an…"
"My memoirs "On the Mechanical Theory of Heat" are of different kinds. Some are devoted to the development of the gene…"