La Termodinamica dagli albori fino alle soglie del XX secolo

Abstract

Thermodynamics, the science of energy and entropy, is one of the most effective tools to understand how the Universe works. Born for utilitarian reasons, in the space of a few decades of the 19th century this discipline extended its field of application to increasingly vast and distant areas, causing an actual revolution in the way we look at Nature and we face the challenges of technology. Its development, although beginning many centuries ago, mainly characterized the 19th century. Its progress, initially slow and uneven, became increasingly rapid after the elucidation of the relationship between heat and temperature. The study of steam engines gave the first strong impetus, but it was with the overcoming of caloricist ideas that we arrived at the concepts of energy and entropy and the principles associated with them, thanks to the work of Kelvin and above all of Clausius. Once these ideas were established, Gibbs and others developed applications in chemistry. At the end of the century, the application of statistics to the study of atomic-molecular systems led to the justification of the laws of thermodynamics and mad it possible to redefine energy and entropy in microscopic terms.