“If all this damned quantum jumping were really here to stay, I should be sorry I ever got involved with quantum theory.” –Schrödinger
In 1789, Lavoisier showed that the total mass during the course of a chemical reaction is unchanged. Rather the atoms simply “reorganize” themselves, kind of like the reshuffling of deck or cards.
In 1789, Lavoisier published An Elementary Treatise on Chemistry where he describes 33 elements. The list begins with caloric and continues with light, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen.
Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) imagined heat to be a fluid composed of particles, deemed by Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) as “caloric”.
Our understanding of the connection between entropy and the microscopic world of atoms is mostly due to the work of James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann.
In 1834 Émile Clapeyron (1799-1864), a former classmate of Carnot’s, published a paper in the Journal de l’École Polytechnique. Here he reformulated Carnot’s work using clear concise mathematics and a new graphical presentation for Carnot’s reversible heat engine (still taught today to every chemistry major taking a good physical chemistry class) that finally brought Carnot’s work to the attention of engineers, chemists and physicists.
Being able to read Maxwell’s work on electromagnetic theory motivated Boltzmann to learn English.
Energy and the first law that governs it can’t explain why certain processes tend in what apparently is a favored direction; for that we need entropy.
The Greek philosopher Anaxagoras considered matter to be infinitely divisible.
Einstein’s 1916-7 approach was as close as anyone got to a full quantum derivation of Planck’s Radiation Law, until an unknown physicist from Calcutta, India revisited the problem in 1924, and created the area of quantum statistics.
