On Jun 23, 2:23 pm, Pentcho Valev <pva...@yahoo.com> wrote:

S'il y avait un esprit critique en France, on aurait été profondément
ému par ce texte:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
pp. 7-8, Jos Uffink: "The historian of science and mathematician
Truesdell made a detailed study of the historical development of
thermodynamics in the period 1822–1854. He characterises the theory,
even in its present state, as ‘a dismal swamp of obscurity’ (1980, p.
6) and ‘a prime example to show that physicists are not exempt from
the madness of crowds’ (ibid. p. 8). He is outright cynical about the
respect with which nonmathematicians treat the Second Law: "Clausius’
verbal statement of the second law makes no sense [. . . ]. All that
remains is a Mosaic prohibition; a century of philosophers and
journalists have acclaimed this commandment; a century of
mathematicians have shuddered and averted their eyes from the unclean.
(ibid. p. 333). Seven times in the past thirty years have I tried to
follow the argument Clausius offers [. . . ] and seven times has it
blanked and gravelled me. [. . . ] I cannot explain what I cannot
understand (ibid. p. 335)." From this anthology it emerges that
although many prominent physicists are firmly convinced of, and
express admiration for the Second Law, there are also serious
complaints, especially from mathematicians, about a lack of clarity
and rigour in its formulation. At the very least one can say that the
Second Law suffers from an image problem: its alleged eminence and
venerability is not perceived by everyone who has been exposed to it.
What is it that makes this physical law so obstreperous that every
attempt at a clear formulation seems to have failed? Is it just the
usual sloppiness of physicists? Or is there a deeper problem? And what
exactly is the connection with the arrow of time and irreversibility?
Could it be that this is also just based on bluff? Perhaps readers
will shrug their shoulders over these questions. Thermodynamics is
obsolete; for a better understanding of the problem we should turn to
more recent, statistical theories. But even then the questions we are
about to study have more than a purely historical importance. The
problem of reproducing the Second Law, perhaps in an adapted version,
remains one of the toughest, and controversial problems in statistical
physics."

Puis l'Esprit Critique de France, s'il existait, chercherait et
trouverait peut-être l'erreur fondamentale en analysant, mot par mot,
la déduction fondamentale de Rudolf Clausius:

http://web.lemoyne.edu/~giunta/Clausius.html
"Ueber die bewegende Kraft der Warme" 1850 Clausius: "If we now
suppose that there are two substances of which the one can produce
more work than the other by the transfer of a given amount of heat,
or, what comes to the same thing, needs to transfer less heat from A
to B to produce a given quantity of work, we may use these two
substances alternately by producing work with one of them in the above
process. At the end of the operations both bodies are in their
original condition; further, the work produced will have exactly
counterbalanced the work done, and therefore, by our former principle,
the quantity of heat can have neither increased nor diminished. The
only change will occur in the distribution of the heat, since more
heat will be transferred from B to A than from A to B, and so on the
whole heat will be transferred from B to A. By repeating these two
processes alternately it would be possible, without any expenditure of
force or any other change, to transfer as much heat as we please from
a cold to a hot body, and this is not in accord with the other
relations of heat, since it always shows a tendency to equalize
temperature differences and therefore to pass from hotter to colder
bodies."

L'Esprit Critique de France, s'il existait, trouverait cela
extrêmement inquiétant:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
Jos Uffink: "A more important objection, it seems to me, is that
Clausius bases his conclusion that the entropy increases in a nicht
umkehrbar process on the assumption that such a process can be closed
by an umkehrbar process to become a cycle. This is essential for the
definition of the entropy difference between the initial and final
states. But the assumption is far from obvious for a system more
complex than an ideal gas, or for states far from equilibrium, or for
processes other than the simple exchange of heat and work.......On
many occasions Clausius was criticised by his contemporaries. I do not
know if, in his own time, he was criticised in particular for his
famous formulation of the second law as the increase of the entropy of
the universe. However, Kuhn (1978, pp. 13-15, p. 260) has pointed out
the remarkable fact that in the book (Clausius 1876) he eventually
composed from his collected articles, every reference to the entropy
of the universe and even to the idea that entropy never decreases in
irreversible processes in adiabatically isolated systems is deleted!"

Mais l'Esprit Critique de France n'existe pas et le problème (très
grave) restera inconnu pour toujours, sans parler de sa solution.

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com