Talk:History of entropy

message: The section of the article headed 'Classical thermodynamic views' contains the following: 
:::::"An early formulation of the Second Law by Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica (1274), is: "It is impossible for an effect to be stronger than its cause.".<http://www.newadvent.org/summa/2029.htm#article3> Here, "be stronger than" in modern terminology corresponds to "have less entropy than." Another early formulation is that "a cause must be equal to or greater than its effect."<http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4181986>"
I think it is wrong to say that Aquinas' statement is an early formulation of the second law. I think the first of the sentences just quoted should be deleted.
The claim that "be stronger than" corresponds to "have less entropy than" is fanciful and inaccurate. Thomas is talking about moral things in the cited source. It is taking the source out of context to apply the doctrine to thermodynamics.
The claim about Descartes' view is contextual. Descartes' reason is about what today we would call transfer of energy as heat. That is indeed relevant to the second law. It is still at best only marginally reasonable to say that Descartes was anticipating the second law, because he offers, alongside the argument about heating, also an argument that something that is not blue cannot cause something to turn blue; this is not about entropy or the second law.
If one really wants to find an early indication of the second law in context in the classical literature, one can find it in Aristotle's physics. His usually ridiculed view, that a body needs a driver to keep it in motion, is hardly different from the currently accepted fact, that the motion of a body is always accompanied by friction with the medium in which it moves. This is dissipation of energy as observed by Kelvin, and is one of the present-day recognized mechanisms of entropy production, which is the basis of the second law. The other main kind of mechanism of entropy production is dispersal of matter. It is fair to point out that Aristotle did not identify friction as the reason for the need for a driver. I am not proposing to put this into the article. I am just proposing to delete the sentence about Thomas.Chjoaygame (talk) 17:19, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  section 'Classical thermodynamic views' 

message: What about entropy?
Who can give the right definition for it. Fabin Benny (talk) 05:47, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  entropy 

message: This quote from Clausius:
 ...then the generations of the quantity of heat Q from work at the temperature T, has the equivalence-value: Q/T
is a misquote. The temperature is lower-case t, and T stands for "a function of the temperature, independent of the nature of the process..." as quoted a bit later.
another quote:
 "T is now the unknown function of the temperature involved in the equivalence-values"
my emphasis.
A few pages later:
 According to this, T is nothing more than the temperature counted from a°, or about 273° C. below the freezing-point; [...] T is simply the absolute temperature.
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Dotanrs (talk • contribs) 15:10, 28 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clausius is misquoted 

message: I came across a curious piece of history, which is that William Rankine and Clausius were converging on entropy around the same time. Rankine gave it the rather poor name "thermodynamic function", and Clausius certainly beat him in the marketing department by coining "entropy" later on in the 1860s. Clausius was also more general and rigorous, it sounds like. The Consensus certainly is that clausius does deserve the main bit of credit.
(I noticed this in Maxwell's book Theory of Heat: when introducing entropy midway through, he credits Clausius primarily but also gives credence to Rankine. See also Hutchinson 1981 "W. J. M. Rankine and the Rise of Thermodynamics" https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087400018264 . )
It could be an interesting topic for inclusion on this article. Science history isn't my forte, so I'll leave it at that. --Nanite (talk) 13:30, 11 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rankine and entropy