Truesdell C. The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics, 1822-1854

New York—Heidelberg—Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1980.The book compares the history of thermodynamics with a rational, fully mathematized and uninterrupted organization of this discipline as obtained from hindsight and only recently completed by the author. Thus the historical course of events appears as a tragicomedy, partly as a "murky swamp of darkness". The reader must constantly go back and forth between the actors on the stage, who, of course, do not yet know the solution of the knots, and Truesdell, who does. Mottos from Dante concerning smoke, stench, crowding, impenetrable thickets and overgrown fields, but also of light and order, accompany the text. One can learn a lot from this book about the relationship of logically mathematical order and physical imagination or intuition, which is allowed to indulge in some brilliant carelessness, i.e., one can learn about the "complementarity of clarity and truth" (Bohr).The Producer's Apology to the Spectators
The Common Inheritance
Prologue: Laplace, Biot, and Poisson
Act I Workless Dissipation: Fourier
Act II. Dissipationless Work: Carnot
Distracting Interlude: Clapeyron and Duhamel
Act III. Equivalence, Conservation, Interconvertibility: When and of What?
Act IV. Internal Energy. The First Paper of Clausius. Entropy: The First Paper of Rankine
Distracting Interlude: Explosion of Print
Schismatic Act V. Antiplot in a Dark and Empty Theatre: Reech's
Discovery of a Too General Theory, and his Failure to Reduce It
Orthodox Act V. Clausius' Second Paper: Absolute Temperatures, Irreversibility, and Oracling
Epilogue: Gotterdammerung
Sources
Index of Persons Mentioned
Index of Matters Treated