Customer Reviews

Treatise On Thermodynamics (1905)

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Seeing this book still in print makes me think that not all is lost. For decades everyone looked for Planck's treatise in order to give unity to his or her collection of facts concerning heat, as well as depth to the whole thing. The careful and elegant exposition still satisfies these needs, though the main trends have changed. The purity of the macroscopic approach championed by Planck (in fact a competition against Boltzmann) may seem now an exageration. You will not find interpretations in terms of molecules, for instance. On the other hand, the charm of the purely macroscopic approach is undeniable. After the introductory chapters the reader will notice an emphasis towards chemical equilibrium. This is, in fact, common to almost all thermodynamics texts of that time (Sommerfeld's , for instance) and is due to the fact that one of the main scientific efforts of that time was to try to synthesize ammonia, badly needed for agriculture and explosives (wars were much mo! re frequent then). The problem was eventually solved, for gaseous reagents, by Planck's students Guldberg and Waage and, especially, by Nernst, with the discovery of the third law of thermodynamics. This, by the way, receives a very detailed and interesting treatment in the last chapter, named The Absolute Value of Entropy. This alone would be worth the reading.

It is a rare circumstance to find books which make you view things in a new way. Planck's book is one of those books. I highly recommend it. It is not necessary to read it cover to cover. Even skimming through it to find the key ideas will illuminate many things.

I have to say that many concepts dealt in this book are avoided in many contemporary books on thermodynamics. This is not coincidential of course. Thermodynamics is one of the most abstract sciences. Relatively easy to used it in applications but far more difficult to understand its foundations.

A highlight of the book is related to irreversible processes. Quoting:

p. 84 "A process which can in no way be completely reversed is termed irreversible all other processes reversible. That a process may be irreversible it is not sufficient that it cannot be directly reversed.[...] The full requirement is that it be impossible even with the assistant of all agents in nature to restore everywhere the exact initial state when the process has taken place".

p. 87 "Since the decision as to whether a particular process is irreversible or reversible depends only on whether the process can in ANY MANNER WHATSOEVER can be completely reversed or not, the nature of the initial and final states, and not the intermediate steps of the process, entirely settle it. The question is whether or not it is possible starting from the final state to reach the initial one in ANY WAY without any other change."

I cannot think of any other explanation (as opposed to a "definition") more clarifying than this.
He also says that heat conduction, friction and free expansion of a gas are all irreversible and proves that if one of these processes was reversible then the other two would also be reversible.

This book addresses the theoretical foundations of thermodynamics. I also recommend the interested reader to read statistical thermodynamics -Nash's "Elements of statistical thermodynamics" is quite illumminating and easy to read- and also "Principles of General Thermodynamics" by Hatsopoulos and Keenan. The latter is quite challenging dealing with the axiomatic foundations of thermodynamics.

Read from the fathers of each science. They teach you many things for their science, more for science in general and much more about thought itself.