Heat is easier to get than work.
Successful conversion of heat to work in a practical heat engine has brought about the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century. These are the energy forms that our industrial society needs, but they are not the ones that are readily available. Heat is available, but not where and when we need it. So we need to convert these primitive energy forms into more useful energy forms, and this is our principal topic of discussion in this part of the course. We shall thus take a closer look at the more important energy forms and then examine the laws that govern their interconversion.