History
This "molecular ordering" entropy perspective traces its origins to molecular movement interpretations developed by Rudolf Clausius in the 1850s, particularly with his 1862 visual conception of molecular disgregation. Similarly, in 1859, after reading a paper on the diffusion of molecules by Clausius, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell formulated the Maxwell distribution of molecular velocities, which gave the proportion of molecules having a certain velocity in a specific range. This was the first-ever statistical law in physics.
In 1864, Ludwig Boltzmann, a young student in Vienna, came across Maxwell’s paper and was so inspired by it that he spent much of his long and distinguished life developing the subject further. Later, Boltzmann, in efforts to develop a kinetic theory for the behavior of a gas, applied the laws of probability to Maxwell's and Clausius' molecular interpretation of entropy so to begin to interpret entropy in terms of order and disorder. Similarly, in 1882 Hermann von Helmholtz used the word "Unordnung" (disorder) to describe entropy.
Read more about this topic: Entropy (order And Disorder)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)