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The first explicit statement of the first law of thermodynamics, by Rudolf Clausius in 1850, referred to cyclic thermodynamic processes, and to the existence of a function of state of the system, the internal energy. He expressed it in terms of a differential equation for the increments of a thermodynamic process. [16]
The first law of thermodynamics is a version of the law of conservation of energy, adapted for thermodynamic processes. In general, the conservation law states that the total energy of an isolated system is constant; energy can be transformed from one form to another, but can be neither created nor destroyed.
In physics, the first law of thermodynamics is an expression of the conservation of total energy of a system. The increase of the energy of a system is equal to the sum of work done on the system and the heat added to that system: = + where is the total energy of a system.
Researchers have made a breakthrough in applying the first law of thermodynamics to complex systems, rewriting the way we understand complex energetic systems.
The truth of this statement for volume is trivial, for particles one might say that the total particle number of each atomic element is conserved. In the case of energy, the statement of the conservation of energy is known as the first law of thermodynamics. A thermodynamic system is in equilibrium when it is no longer changing in time.
The first law of thermodynamics is essentially a definition of heat, i.e. heat is the change in the internal energy of a system that is not caused by a change of the external parameters of the system. However, the second law of thermodynamics is not a defining relation for the entropy.
The history of thermodynamics is a fundamental strand in the history of physics, the history of chemistry, and the history of science in general. Due to the relevance of thermodynamics in much of science and technology, its history is finely woven with the developments of classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, magnetism, and chemical kinetics, to more distant applied fields such as ...
Julius Robert von Mayer (25 November 1814 – 20 March 1878) was a German physician, chemist, and physicist and one of the founders of thermodynamics.He is best known for enunciating in 1841 one of the original statements of the conservation of energy or what is now known as one of the first versions of the first law of thermodynamics, namely that "energy can be neither created nor destroyed".