Foundations of Thermodynamics

Abstract

In the previous chapters we had encountered some of the notions and results of thermoydnamics. For the understanding of the following chapters, it is necessary to give a short and elementary account of the foundations of ther thermodynamics, one of the important branches of physics. It will be useful to observe, first of all, that thermodynamics demonstrates how important is an approach based on phenomena dependent on such fundamental quantities as energy, entropy, free energy etc. Thanks to its simple logical construction, thermodynamics enables us to grasp from a fairly general point of view the physical significance of a given problem. This was perhaps the reason why this thermodynamical approach was applied to problems far from the realm of physics. This is easy to understand if one notes that the equilibrium concept, conservation laws, processes of displacement and transfer, the law of degradation of energy and many other objects of thermodynamics have distinct analogues in economics,biology, information theory and sociology. Therefore, we may expect that by applying the phenomenal approach of thermodynamics to other sceinces we can obtain some very useful results. However, it is necessary to comprehend the principal difference between the objects of dead nature studied in thermodynamics and objects of living nature studied in biological and socio-economic sciences. These questions will be dealt with in the last section of this chapter.