First law of thermodynamics? History The process of development of the first law of thermodynamics was by way of many tries and mistakes of investigation, over a period of about half a century.
The first full statements of the law came in 1850 from Rudolf Clausius and from William Rankine; Rankine's statement was perhaps not quite as clear and distinct as was Clausius'.[1] A main aspect of the struggle was to deal with the previously proposed caloric theory of heat. Germain Hess in 1840 stated a conservation law for the so-called 'heat of reaction' for chemical reactions.[2] His law was later recognized as a consequence of the first law of thermodynamics, but Hess's statement was not explicitly concerned with the relation between energy exchanges by heat and work. Original statements: the "thermodynamic approach" The first explicit statement of the first law of thermodynamics, by Rudolf Clausius in 1850, referred to cyclic thermodynamic processes.
Infinite Universe? Primevil Atom? Monseigneur Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, (French: [ʒɔʁʒə ləmɛtʁ] ( ); 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the Université catholique de Louvain.[1] He was the first known academic to propose the theory of the expansion of the Universe, widely misattributed to Edwin Hubble.[2][3] He was also the first to derive what is now known as Hubble's law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article.[4][5][6][7] Lemaître also proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his 'hypothesis of the primeval atom or the "Cosmic Egg".[8] Biography[edit] According to the Big Bang theory, the universe emerged from an extremely dense and hot state (singularity).
Space itself has been expanding ever since, carrying galaxies with it, like raisins in a rising loaf of bread. Work[edit]