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Famous publications

What is Life? (title page)In the history of science, are a number of famous publications instrumental in the development of chemistry, thermodynamics, human chemistry, and human thermodynamics, including:

  1. Opticks (1704) by Isaac Newton – seeded the logic of the affinity table.
  2. A Dissertation on Elective Attractions (1775) by Torbern Bergman – most influential textbook on the theory of chemical affinity.
  3. Elements of Chemistry (1787) by Antoine Lavoisier – introduced the chemists to caloric theory.
  4. Elective Affinities (1809) by Johann von Goethe – founding book of human chemistry.
  5. On the Motive Power of Fire (1824) by Sadi Carnot – outlined the basic laws of the generalized heat engine.
  6. Mechanical Theory of Heat (1865) by Rudolf Clausius – unified the newly forming science of energy and entropy.
  7. On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances (1876) by Willard Gibbs – founded the science of chemical thermodynamics.
  8. Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances (1923) by Gilbert Lewis and Merle Randall – distilled Gibbs' Equilibrium down into a easier and more applicable language that chemists could understand.
  9. Modern Thermodynamics by the Methods of Willard Gibbs (1933) by Edward Guggenheim – is one of the two founding books, along with Lewis and Randall's Thermodynamics, of modern chemical thermodynamics.
  10. The Next Million Years (1952) by C.G. Darwin – the first book to use the terms "human molecule" and "human thermodynamics" in one theory.
  11. On the Thermodynamics of Biological Evolution (1978) by Georgi Gladyshev – first unified Gibbsian-based theory of evolution.

Among others. Short articles on selections of these publications are listed in the “Wiki pages” file subsection (adjacent) to this header page. The 1923 textbook Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances by American physical chemists Gilbert Lewis and Merle Randall, for instance, has been called "the world's most quoted scientific book" and in thermodynamics it is the certainly the most referenced. [1] Other famous publications having a direct bearing or influence on human thermodynamics are listed below:

● Memoir on the Motive Power of Fire (1834) by Émile Clapeyron – introduced the physicists (particularly Clausius) to Carnot's On the Motive Power of Fire.
● What is Life? (1944) by Erwin Schrödinger – introduced the lay audience to the idea that "life feeds on negative entropy".
● Order Out of Chaos (1984) by Ilya Prigogine’s (his most-popular book) – introduced the world to “dissipative structure” theory.

In the physics community, the 1985 textbook Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics by American physicist Herbert Callen is very popular and is likely the most-referenced modern statistical thermodynamics book. [2]

References
1. (a) Angrist, Stanley W. and Helper, Loren G. (1967). Order and Chaos – Laws of Energy and Entropy, (pg. 27: "most quoted"). New York: Basic Books.
(b) The "most-referenced" book in the reference sections of all of the books in American chemical engineer Libb Thims' 200+ thermodynamics book collection is Lewis and Randall's Thermodynamics.
2. (a) Note: the popularity of the 1985 Herbert Callen textbook Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics, which the second edition to the 1960 textbook Thermodynamics: an Introduction to the Physical Theories of Equilibrium Thermostatics and Irreversible Thermodynamics, is due in large part to the popularity of Callen’s 1951 paper “Irreversibility and Generalized Noise”, written with Ted A. Welton, which by 1955 had become a “citation classic”, having been cited in over 370 publications.
(b) Staff writer. (1985). “This Week’s Citation Classic”, Current Contents, No. 1, Jan. 07.






Latest page update: made by Sadi-Carnot , Aug 13 2008, 11:59 PM EDT (about this update About This Update Sadi-Carnot link - Sadi-Carnot


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