Energy, the Subtle Concept The discovery of Feynman's blocks from Leibniz to Einstein

by Coopersmith, Jennifer

• ISBN13: 9780199546503
• ISBN10: 0199546509
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-08-13
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Energy is at the heart of physics and of huge importance to society and yet no book exists specifically to explain this elusive concept, and in simple, largely non-mathematical, terms. In tracking the history of energy and its discovery, this book explains the intellectual revolutions required to comprehend energy. Foundational texts by Descartes, Leibniz. Bernoulli. d'Alembert, Lagrange, Hamilton. Boltzmann, Clausius, Carnot, and others are made accessible, and the engines of Watt and Joule are examined.

Author Biography

Jennifer Coopersmith received her PhD in nuclear physics from the University of London, and was later a research fellow at TRIUMF, University of British Columbia. She was for many years an associate lecturer for the Open University (London and Oxford) honing her skills at answering those "damn-fool profound and difficult questions" that students ask. She currently does similar work on astrophysics courses for Swinburne University in Melbourne.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. x
List of Illustrations	p. xiii
Introduction: Feynman's Blocks	p. 1
Perpetual Motion	p. 5
Vis viva, the First 'Block' of Energy	p. 14
Heat in the Seventeenth Century	p. 46
Heat in the Eighteenth Century	p. 63
The Discovery of Latent and Specific Heats	p. 78
A Hundred and One Years of Mechanics: Newton to Lagrange	p. 91
A Tale of Two Countries: the Rise of the Steam Engine and the Caloric Theory of Heat	p. 148
Rumford, Davy, and Young	p. 168
Naked Heat: the Gas Laws and the Specific Heats of Gases	p. 178
Two Contrasting Characters: Fourier and Herapath	p. 201
Sadi Carnot	p. 208
Hamilton and Green	p. 230
The Mechanical Equivalent of Heat	p. 246
Faraday and Helmholtz	p. 264
The Laws of Thermodynamics: Thomson and Clausius	p. 284
A Forward Look	p. 304
Impossible Things, Difficult Things	p. 324
Conclusions	p. 350
Timeline	p. 361
Questions	p. 367
Bibliography	p. 370
Notes and References	p. 371
Index	p. 395
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