Timeline of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and random processes

Encyclopedia : T : TI : TIM : Timeline of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and random processes

A timeline of events related to thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and random processes.

Contents

1 Ancient times
2 Before 1800
3 1800-1847
4 1848-1899
5 1900-1944
6 1945-present
7 See also

Ancient times

5th century BC - the classical elements are used to support various theories of combustion; Empedocles writes about his four-element theory of earth, water, air, and fire
5th century BC - Leucippus and Democritus formulate the first philosophy of atomism
1st century BC - Lucretius writes his epic atomistic poem De Rerum Natura

Before 1800

1620 - Francis Bacon reviews a wide range of observations about heat and related phenomena, and suggests that heat is related to motion (Novum Organum, Book II, XI)
1669 - J.J. Becher puts forward a theory of combustion involving combustible earth (Latin terra pinguis).
1676-1689 - Gottfried Leibniz develops the concept of vis viva, a limited version of the conservation of energy
1694-1734 - Georg Ernst Stahl names Becher's combustible earth as phlogiston and develops the theory
1702 - Guillaume Amontons introduces the concept of absolute zero, based on observations of gases
1738 - Daniel Bernoulli publishes Hydrodynamics, initiating the kinetic theory
1761 - Joseph Black discovers that ice absorbs heat without changing its temperature when melting
1772 - Black's student Daniel Rutherford discovers nitrogen, which he calls phlogisticated air, and together they explain the results in terms of the phlogiston theory
1776 - John Smeaton publishes a paper on experiments related to power, work, momentum, and kinetic energy, supporting the conservation of energy
1777 - Carl Wilhelm Scheele distinguishes heat transfer by thermal radiation from that by convection and conduction
1783 - Antoine Lavoisier discovers oxygen and develops an explanation for combustion; in his book Reflexions sur le phlogistique, he deprecates the phlogiston theory and proposes a caloric theory
1791 - Pierre Prévost shows that all bodies radiate heat, no matter how hot or cold they are
1798 - Count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson) performs measurements of the frictional heat generated in boring cannons and develops the idea that heat is a form of kinetic energy; his measurements refute caloric theory, but are imprecise enough to leave room for doubt

1800-1847

1804 - Sir John Leslie observes that a matte black surface radiates heat more effectively than a polished surface, suggesting the importance of black body radiation
1805 - William Hyde Wollaston defends the conservation of energy in On the Force of Percussion
1808 - John Dalton defends caloric theory in A New System of Chemistry and describes how it combines with matter, especially gases; he proposes that the heat capacity of gases varies inversely with atomic weight
1810 - Sir John Leslie freezes water to ice artificially
1813 - Peter Ewart supports the idea of the conservation of energy in his paper On the measure of moving force; the paper strongly influences Dalton and his pupil, James Joule
1819 - Pierre Louis Dulong and Alexis Thérèse Petit give the Dulong-Petit law for the specific heat capacity of a crystal
1820 - John Herapath develops some ideas in the kinetic theory of gases but mistakenly associates temperature with molecular momentum rather than kinetic energy; his work receives little attention other than from Joule
1822 - Joseph Fourier formally introduces the use of dimensions for physical quantities in his Theorie Analytique de la Chaleur
1822 - Marc Séguin writes to John Herschel supporting the conservation of energy and kinetic theory
1824 - Sadi Carnot analyzes the efficiency of steam engines using caloric theory; he develops the notion of a reversible process and, in postulating that no such thing exists in nature, lays the foundation for the second law of thermodynamics
1827 - Robert Brown discovers the Brownian motion of pollen and dye particles in water
1831 - Macedonio Melloni demonstrates that black body radiation can be reflected, refracted, and polarised in the same way as light
1834 - Émile Clapeyron popularises Carnot's work through a graphical and analytic formulation
1841 - Julius Robert von Mayer, an amateur scientist, writes a paper on the conservation of energy, but his lack of academic training leads to its rejection
1842 - Mayer makes a connection between work, heat, and the human metabolism based on his obervations of blood made while a ship's surgeon; he calculates the mechanical equivalent of heat
1843 - John James Waterston fully expounds the kinetic theory of gases, but is ridiculed and ignored
1843 - James Joule experimentally finds the mechanical equivalent of heat
1847 - Hermann von Helmholtz publishes a definitive statement of the conservation of energy, the first law of thermodynamics

1848-1899

1848 - William Thomson extends the concept of absolute zero from gases to all substances
1849 - William John Macquorn Rankine calculates the correct relationship between saturated vapour pressure and temperature using his hypothesis of molecular vortices
1850 - Rankine uses his vortex theory to establish accurate relationships between the temperature, pressure, and density of gases, and expressions for the latent heat of evaporation of a liquid; he accurately predicts the surprising fact that the apparent specific heat of saturated steam will be negative.
1850 - Rudolf Clausius gives the first clear joint statement of the first and second law of thermodynamics, abandoning the caloric theory, but preserving Carnot's principle.
1851 - Thomson gives an alternative statement of the second law.
1852 - Joule and Thomson demonstrate that a rapidly expanding gas cools, later named the Joule-Thomson effect
1854 - Helmholtz puts forward the idea of the heat death of the universe
1854 - Clausius establishes the importance of dQ/T (Clausius's theorem), but does not yet name the quantity.
1854 - Rankine introduces his thermodynamic function, later identified as entropy
1856 - August Krönig publishes an account of the kinetic theory of gases, probably after reading Waterston's work
1857 - Clausius gives a modern and compelling account of the kinetic theory of gases in his On the nature of motion called heat
1859 - James Clerk Maxwell discovers the distribution law of molecular velocities
1859 - Gustav Kirchoff shows that energy emission from a black body is a function of only temperature and frequency
1865 - Clausius introduces the modern macroscopic concept of entropy
1867 - Maxwell asks whether Maxwell's demon could reverse irreversible processes
1870 - Clausius proves the scalar virial theorem
1872 - Ludwig Boltzmann states the Boltzmann equation for the temporal development of distribution functions in phase space, and publishes his H-theorem
1874 - Thomson formally states the second law of thermodynamics.
1876 - Josiah Willard Gibbs publishes the first of two papers (the second appears in 1878) which discuss phase equilibria, statistical ensembles, the free energy as the driving force behind chemical reactions, and chemical thermodynamics in general.
1876 - Johann Loschmidt criticises Boltzmann's H theorem as being incompatible with microscopic reversibility (Loschmidt's paradox).
1877 - Boltzmann states the relationship between entropy and probability.
1879 - Jožef Stefan observes that the total radiant flux from a blackbody is proportional to the fourth power of its temperature and states the Stefan-Boltzmann law.
1884 - Boltzmann derives the Stefan-Boltzmann blackbody radiant flux law from thermodynamic considerations.
1888 - Henri-Louis Le Chatelier states that the response of a chemical system perturbed from equilbrium will be to counteract the perturbation.
1889 - Walther Nernst relates the voltage of electrochemical cells to their chemical thermodynamics via the Nernst equation.
1889 - Svante Arrhenius introduces the idea of activation energy for chemical reactions, giving the Arrhenius equation.
1893 - Wilhelm Wien discovers the displacement law for a blackbody's maximum specific intensity.

1900-1944

1900 - Max Planck suggests that light may be emitted in discrete frequencies, giving his law of black-body radiation
1905 - Albert Einstein argues that the reality of quanta would explain the photoelectric effect
1905 - Albert Einstein mathematically analyzes Brownian motion as a result of random molecular motion
1906 - Walther Nernst presents a formulation of the third law of thermodynamics
1907 - Albert Einstein uses quantum theory to estimate the heat capacity of an Einstein solid
1909 - Constantin Carathéodory develops an axiomatic system of thermodynamics
1910 - Albert Einstein and Marian Smoluchowski find the Einstein-Smoluchowski formula for the attenuation coefficient due to density fluctuations in a gas
1911 - Paul Ehrenfest & Tatjana Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa publish their classical review on the statistical mechanics of Boltzmann, Begriffliche Grundlagen der statistischen Auffassung in der Mechanik
1912 - Peter Debye gives an improved heat capacity estimate by allowing low-frequency phonons
1916 - Sydney Chapman and David Enskog systematically develop the kinetic theory of gases.
1916 - Albert Einstein considers the thermodynamics of atomic spectral lines and predicts stimulated emission
1919 - James Jeans discovers that the dynamical constants of motion determine the distribution function for a system of particles
1920 - Meghnad Saha states his ionization equation
1923 - Peter Debye and Erich Huckel publish a statistical treatment of the dissociation of electrolytes
1924 - Satyendra Nath Bose introduces Bose-Einstein statistics, in a paper translated by Einstein
1926 - Enrico Fermi and Paul Dirac introduce Fermi-Dirac statistics for fermions
1927 - John von Neumann introduces the density matrix representation and establishes quantum statistical mechanics
1928 - J.B. Johnson discovers Johnson noise in a resistor
1928 - Harry Nyquist derives the fluctuation-dissipation relationship for a resistor to explain Johnson noise
1929 - Lars Onsager derives the Onsager reciprocal relations
1942 - J.L. Doob states his theorem on Gauss-Markov processes
1944 - Lars Onsager gives an analytic solution to the 2D Ising model including its phase transition

1945-present

1948 - Claude Elwood Shannon establishes information theory.
1957 - A.S. Kompaneets derives his Compton scattering Fokker-Planck equation.
1957 - Ryogo Kubo derives the first of the Green-Kubo relations for linear transport coefficients.
1957 - Edwin T. Jaynes gives MaxEnt interpretation of thermodynamics from information theory.
1972 - Jacob Bekenstein suggests that black holes have an entropy proportional to their surface area.
1974 - Stephen Hawking predicts that black holes will radiate particles with a black-body spectrum which can cause black hole evaporation