The first draught of this book, a single lecture, was written early in 1970. Many men have helped me in many ways during the years of perplexity and frustration the work has cost me since then—so many that I fear my memory cannot muster them. Specific acknowledgments in regard to details will be found at certain points in the text. I thank Professor E. Daub for some helpful observations in 1970/1971. Mr. Stephen Winters discussed and criticized much of the text as it evolved in 1973/1977; he checked most of my translations and references and brought to my attention some sources I might otherwise have overlooked. Collaboration with Mr. Bharatha in 1974/1975, which resulted in the book often cited below as Concepts and Logic, itself an outgrowth of the studies leading to this one, provided essential understanding without which I could never have released for publication any work with the title under which I present my results now. He has also criticized some passages in the text of this book. Conversations and correspondence with Mr. Serrin, mainly in 1978/1979, have added much to my understanding of the essential issues of thermodynamics itself, of some of the ideas of Kelvin, Clausius, and Gibbs, and of the specific defects in much of the later work, especially Carathodory's. I owe most to Mr. Chi-Sing Man, whose untiring perseverance in searching out, probing, and perpending the sources major and minor is matched by his gentle refusal to let pass any vagueness that can be cleared, any gap in the record that can be closed. Word by word and equation by equation, he scrutinized the final manuscript and the galley proofs with a devotion seldom spent on the work of another. At several points in the text specific attributions to him will be found, and he is the author of the appendix to § 9D. Finally I thank the other members of my seminar in the spring of 1978: Messrs. C. Davini, Richard James, and M. Pitteri, for their critical analysis of some central aspects of the work of the most important and most difficult authors: Fourier, Carnot, Kelvin, Rankine, Clausius.

Download File Size:32.5 MB

---