Reconsidering the Foundations of Thermodynamics from an Engineering Perspective

Currently, there are two approaches to the foundations of thermodynamics. One, 7 associated with the mechanistical Clausius-Boltzmann tradition, is favored by the physics 8 community. The other, associated with the post-mechanical Carnot tradition, is favored by the 9 engineering community. The bold hypothesis is that the conceptual foundation of engineering 10 thermodynamics is the more comprehensive. Therefore, contrary to the dominant consensus, 11 engineering thermodynamics (ET) represents the true foundation of thermodynamics. The 12 foundational issue is crucial to a number of unresolved current and historical issues in 13 thermodynamic theory and practice. ET formally explains the limited successes of the ‘rational 14 mechanical’ approaches as idealizing special cases. Thermodynamic phenomena are uniquely 15 dissymmetric and can never be completely understood in terms of symmetry-based mechanical 16 concepts. Consequently, ET understands thermodynamic phenomena in new way, in terms of the 17 post-mechanical formulation of action. The ET concept of action and the action framework trace 18 back to Maupertuis’s Principle of Least Action, both clarified in the engineering worldview research 19 program of Lazare and Sadi Carnot. Despite the intervening Lagrangian ‘mechanical idealization of 20 action’, the original dualistic, indeterminate engineering understanding of action, somewhat 21 unexpectedly, re-emerged in Planck’s quantum of action. The link between engineering 22 thermodynamics and quantum theory is not spurious and each of our current formulations helps 23 us develop our understanding of the other. Both the ET and quantum theory understandings of 24 thermodynamic phenomena, as essentially dissymmetric (viz. embracing complementary), entail 25 that there must be an irreducible, cumulative historical, qualitatively emergent, aspect of reality. 26


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To claim that one theory supersedes another is more subtle and conceptual [7]. The transition to 102 a more general, superseding theory is conceptually discontinuous, meaning that you cannot simply 103 reason your way from the initial theory to the superseding theory. You cannot derive the more 104 general superseding conceptual system from the superseded theory. The conceptual discontinuity

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Characteristic of advanced conceptual tools is that they allow one to generate novel questions,

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An important consequence of the conceptual advances involved in paradigm shifts is that just 126 as one cannot logically derive, for instance, Einstein's relativistic physics from Newtonian physics, it 127 is also the case that one cannot understand the conceptual apparatus of Einstein's relativistic physics 128 from within the conceptual framework of Newtonian physics. Similarly, the more sophisticated post-129 mechanical conceptual framework of quantum theory cannot be either derived from or understood 130 from within the conceptual frameworks of either Newtonian particle mechanics or Maxwellian 131 electromagnetic wave mechanics.

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The point of all this is that according to my bold hypothesis the conceptual apparatus of the 133 engineering framework cannot be derived from or understood in terms of any classical mechanical 134 conceptual framework. Stated another way, the concepts of the more advanced engineering 135 2 This emergent aspect of actual advances remains largely unexplained. In the idealized scientific (mechanical) model, advances should be systematic, logico-mathematically consistent and convergence toward complete knowledge, wherein the range of meaningful questions should narrow as the uncertainty declines.

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Engineering is thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is engineering.

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In order to develop and defend the bold hypothesis there are two closely related tasks. First, we 155 need to articulate engineering thermodynamics from within an engineering conceptual framework.

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For instance, rejecting attempts to represent Carnot's insights in the terms of a rational mechanics.    3 We have been lacking a philosophy of engineering and engineering worldview that could subsume and supersede the previously dominant philosophy of science and the scientific (viz. mechanical) worldview. We need to reexamine both current scientific epistemology and ontology from a new post-mechanical point of view. 4 What has been particularly misleading is that after each conceptually discontinuous advance the new way of understanding is re-axiomatized using the new concepts and definitions. Superficially, it can 'appear' that the sequence of advances have all occurred within one logico-mathematical framework, now, 'more clearly understood' in the concepts and definitions of this new latest axiomatization. Such an attitude is at least reasonable if one presupposes that the eventual final theory of everything will have a single, unified axiomatizable structure. Only with careful historical scholarship can it be established that the axiomatized advances are a sequence of logically discontinuous axiomatizations, each involving a paradigm shift to a more general conceptual framework that supersedes the prior axiomatized understandings. Only with quantum theory and the abandonment of the presupposition that the final theory will be mechanical, does a new approach begin to be taken seriously. Only with the embrace of post-mechanical quantum framework does the 'rational mechanist' dream of a conceptually uniform, logico-mathematically consistent final theory seem to be impossible.

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Another way to characterize Lazare's project is as an attempt to develop a more general, post-256 mechanical worldview that is able to make sense of the place the engineer, common engineering 257 knowledge and engineering practices, in the universe. The rational mechanics (viz. scientific)

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worldviews have no way to make sense of the creative freedom presupposed in engineering.

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The vis-viva debate is commonly represented as concerned with the proper understanding (viz.

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The 'indeterminate situation' in engineering thermodynamics, by analogy at least, might be 396 represented in terms of the Gibbs free-energy situation -constrained but enabling. However, it is 397 important to recognize, per hypothesis, that the Helmholtz free-energy situation is complementary.

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The Gibbs and Helmholtz situations define the possibility of performing two alternative, opposite 399 types of work.

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It is perhaps helpful to recall that quantum theory was, and still is, a theory of thermodynamics.  Bohr's insight was that not only are idealized particle and wave phenomena complementarity, but the idealized structure and function of the experimental designs required to observe them must be complementary.
Indeed, the sequence of actions required to generate those mechanically idealized experimental designs must be complementary.

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Bohr emphasized that to observe and investigate the particle-like aspect of reality you need a 466 different type of experimental setup than if you wish to investigate the wave-like aspect of reality.

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Newtonian reality is ideally completely local and Maxwellian reality is ideally completely non-local.

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Similarly, since the more general indeterminate 'action' of quantum theory cannot be reduced to the 549 concepts of classical particle mechanics and/or wave mechanics, a more general post-mechanical 550 framework is required to understand the dissymmetric quantum worldview.

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There is another important entailment of the dissymmetry thesis. Classically symmetric systems 552 are always conservative -zero-sum games. In a simple Newtonian system every action has an equal 553 and opposite reaction. If the action and the reaction are of the same type, then the net change is zero.

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In closed, isolated mechanical systems with one type of ontology, one uniform type of 'energy', the properly represented as having an irreducible an emergent, quality. In the action framework 571 processes are necessarily generative of a net historical product. What is the product? Per hypothesis, 572 the net product over time is a cumulatively actualizing, historically evolving non-zero-sum universe.

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It is not coincidental that subsequent to his insights leading to the Principle of Least Action,

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Maupertuis composed two major works on evolution [44] [45]. If the engineering thermodynamic 575 16 Atkins (page 9) [1]: "In 1851 Kelvin adopted that, after all, physics was the science of energy. Although forces could come and go, energy was here to stay. This concept appealed deeply to Kelvin's religious inclinations: God, he could now argue, endowed the world at the creation with a store of energy, and that divine gift would persist for eternity, while the ephemeral forces danced to the music of time and spun the transitory phenomena of the world.*" "*A mischievous cosmologist might now turn this argument on its head. One version of the Big Bang, the inflationary scenario, can be interpreted as meaning that the total energy of the Universe is indeed constant, but constant at zero! The positive energy of the Universe (largely represented by the energy equivalent of the mass of the particles present, that is, by the relation E = mc 2 ) might exactly balance the negative energy (the gravitational attractive potential energy), so that overall the total might be zero.  reassures us that the 'real', hidden, underlying reality has no participants, is completely symmetric 627 and 'energy' is conserved [55].