Atkin's 4 Laws that Drive the Universe: Chapter 2 Notes

This chapter is on the first law of thermodynamics, the law of energy conservation.  Many of the things brought up by Atkins here I am familiar with, in particular the moelcular basis of work and heat.

It is interesting to see him put in words however a reverse way of relating work and energy.  Work is something can be quantified using mechanistic terms and properties as work can simply be measured as the product of force applied through a certain distance.  This gives him then a basis for defining what energy is: energy is what gives a system the capacity to do work.  But, as is familiar to wveryone, this entity energy can also be lost or gained in the form of heat.  Here is then is where he launches on to how heat and work are processes by which the energy of a system can change.

Of course, heat capacity was also discussed as this is a property that is indicative of the variations that different susbtances can dissipate heat.

He introduces the term enthalpy as simply a bookkeeping property for which there is no molecular foundation can be discerned.  I appreciated his statement that only fundamental properties like energy and entropy can more readily be described at the molecular level and not bookkeeping proerpties like ethalpy.

I did not appreciate, however, the vagueness with which he tried to explain what a reversible process is :-(.

A couple of quotes I like:

"Work is energy tamed, and required greater sophistication to contrive.  Thus, humanity stumbled easily on to fire but needed millenia to arrive at the sophistication of the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, and the jet engine."

"Precise molecular interpretations can be given only of the fundamental properties of a system, its temperature, its internal energy, and - ... - the entropy.  They cannot be given for accounting properties , properties that have simply been contrived to make calcualtions easier. " (e.g., enthalpy).

This is what I like about Atkins' writing, his ability to express these thoughts using precise and simple language.