In the history of science, famous publications are a number of memoirs, books, and textbook that have been instrumental in the development of chemistry, thermodynamics, and particularly human chemistry and human thermodynamics. Short articles on selections of these publications are listed in the “Wiki pages” file subsection (adjacent) to this header page; others are listed below:

List

Date	Famous Publication	Signficance	Person[s]
1620	Elementa Chemiae (Elements of Chemistry)	Established Boerhaave's law; later used by Lavoisier.	Herman Boerhaave
1660	New Experiments: Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects: Made, for the most part, in a New Pneumatical Engine	In defense of this publication, found in the 1662 second edition, contains Boyle's law, a forerunner to the ideal gas law.	Robert Boyle
1686	The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy	Established the three laws of motion.	Isaac Newton
1690	A New Method of Obtaining Very Great Motive Powers at Small Cost	Laid out the designs for the steam engine and described the outline of the Carnot cycle.	Denis Papin
1704	Query 31 (Opticks)	Seeded the logic of the affinity table in Query 31 of the 1718 edition.	Isaac Newton
1738	Hydrodynamica	Defined pressure and verbally stated the precepts of the ideal gas law.	Daniel Bernoulli
1775	A Dissertation on Elective Attractions	The founding textbook of chemical affinity; used by Goethe in his human elective afffinity theory.	Torbern Bergman
1787	Elements of Chemistry	Introduced the world, and particularly Sadi Carnot, to caloric theory.	Antoine Lavoisier
1798	"An Enquiry Concerning the Source of the Heat which is Excited by Friction"	Laid question to Lavoisier's caloric theory; thus initiating the postulate of the mechanical equivalent of heat.	Benjamin Thomson
1809	Elective Affinities	Founded the science of human chemistry by applying the logic of elective affinity reactions to interpersonal human relationships and love.	Johann Goethe
1824	Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire	Initiated the science of thermodynamics with its description of the Carnot cycle.	Sadi Carnot
1829	Calculation of the Effect of Machines	Mathematically defined work and kinetic energy.	Gustave Coriolis
1834	Memoir on the Motive Power of Fire	Introduced physicists (particularly Thomson and Clausius) to Carnot's Reflections.	Émile Clapeyron
1845	“On the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat”	Established the mechanical equivalent of heat.	James Joule
1848	“On an Absolute Thermometric Scale founded on Carnot’s Theory of the Motive Power of Heat, and Calculated from Regnault’s Observations.”	Introduced the absolute temperature scale.	William Thomson
1849	“An Account of Carnot’s Theory of the Motive Power of Heat; with Numerical Results Deduced from Regnault’s Experiments on Steam”	Introduced Clausius to the difficulties inherent in Carnot's principle.	William Thomson
1850	"On the Moving Force of Heat and the Laws of Heat which may be Deduced Therefrom"	Began to lay the foundations for the science of thermodynamics (mechanical theory of heat).	Rudolf Clausius
1851	“On the Dynamical Theory of Heat"	Contains the Kelvin-statement of the second law.	William Thomson
1852	“On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy”	Introduced dissipation and energy to the lay public; and established the law of dissipation.	William Thomson
1859	A Manual of the Steam Engine and Other Prime Movers	First textbook on thermodynamics.	William Rankine
1859	On the Origin of Species	Situated the theory of evolution as an upward process.	Charles Darwin
1865	The Mechanical Theory of Heat	Founded the science of thermodynamics.	Rudolf Clausius
1872	"Further Studies on the Thermal Equilibrium of Gas Molecules"	Contained the first explicit probabilistic expression, the H-theorem, for the entropy of an ideal gas.	Ludwig Boltzmann
1876	On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances	Founded the science of chemical thermodynamics.	Willard Gibbs
1877	“On a Relation between the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Probabilities”	Contains the origins of proportionality equation between S and log W (S = k ln W).	Ludwig Boltzmann
1882	"The Thermodynamics of Chemical Processes"	Showed that free energy is the measure of affinity.	Hermann Helmholtz
1884	Studies in Chemical Dynamics	Defined affinity as the maximum external work done by the chemical reaction at constant temperature and volume	Jacobus van't Hoff
1886	"The Second Law of Thermodynamics"	Introduced the life is a struggle for entropy riddle.	Ludwig Boltzmann
1893	"The Scientific Work of Gustav Adolph Hirn"	The term "human thermodynamics" was coined in it.	Bryan Donkin
1898	"Essay on Social Mechanics"	The first paper on human chemical thermodynamics.	Leon Winiarski
1910	A Letter to American Teachers of History	Argued that the teaching of the second law in history courses (history thermodynamics) should be mandatory.	Henry Adams
1914	Human Chemistry	First booklet on the science of human chemistry; viewing people as "human chemical elements" with ideas on human entropy, affinities, reactions of individuals, etc.	William Fairburn
1923	Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances	Made the obtuse concepts of Gibbs' Equilibrium readily available to the chemists.	Gilbert Lewis Merle Randall
1925	The Animate and the Inanimate	An attempt at a reconciliation of the second law with animated life on the premise of entropy reversal.	William Sidis
1929	“On the Decrease in Entropy in a Thermodynamic System by the Intervention of Intelligent Beings”	Disposed of Maxwell's demon via showing that the information collection abilities of the demon would require energy.	Leo Szilard
1933	Modern Thermodynamics by the Methods of Willard Gibbs	The second book to distill Gibbs' Equilibrium.	Edward Guggenheim
1941	“Metabolic Generation and Utilization of Phosphate Bond Energy”	Presented the theory of free energy coupling in the context of phosphate bond energy use.	Fritz Lipmann
1944	What is Life?	Introduced the lay world to the simplified postulate that life is something that "feeds on negative entropy".	Erwin Schrödinger
1948	We Human Chemicals	Prototype book to the science of human chemistry.	Thomas Dreier
1952	The Next Million Years	The first book to use the terms "human molecule" and "human thermodynamics" in one theory	C.G. Darwin
1971	The Entropy Law	Introduced entropy to the economists.	Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
1972	"Thermodynamics of Evolution"	An attempt at a nonequilibrium thermodynamics explanation of evolution.	Ilya Prigogine Gregoire Nicolis Agnes Babloyantz
1977	Self-Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems: From Dissipative Structures to Order Through Fluctuations	Introduced the world to the view that life is a far-from-equilibrium dissipative structure.	Ilya Prigogine Gregoire Nicolis
1978	"On the Thermodynamics of Biological Evolution"	Outlined a Gibbsian thermodynamics view of evolution.	Georgi Gladyshev
1984	Order Out of Chaos	Introduced the lay world to the “dissipative structure” theory of bifurcations and fluctuations.	Ilya Prigogine
1997	Thermodynamic Theory of the Evolution of Living Beings	The first book to explain evolution via changes in Gibbs free energy.	Georgi Gladyshev
2001	"The Thermodynamics of Love"	A light-hearted disscusion on the Gibbsian thermodynamics of love from a human chemical reaction point of view.	David Hwang
2002	Ecological Stoichiometry: the Biology of the Elements from Molecules to the Biosphere	Contains first published calculation for the human molecular formula for a human molecule.	Robert Sterner James Elser
2004	Chemical Affinity in 1806	Chapter sub-section which discusses Goethe's human elective affinities in the context of modern chemical thermodynamics.	Tominaga Keii
2007	Human Chemistry	The first textbook on the science of human chemistry; expounding on the view of systems of humans as Carnot cycle driven thermodynamic systems of chemically reactive human molecules.	Libb Thims
2008	The Human Molecule	The first book on the history of the concept of the "human molecule" the central component of a human thermodynamic system.	Libb Thims

Discussion
Among these, the 1923 textbook Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances, by American physical chemists Gilbert Lewis and Merle Randall, has been called "the world's most quoted scientific book" and among schools of thermodynamics it is the core book of the Lewis school. In the reference section to thermodynamics books and textbooks it is the certainly the most referenced [1]

In mechanical engineering community, it is the view of the MIT school of thermodynamics, particularly according to Italian engineer Gian Beretta, that the 1965 Principles of General Thermodynamics by George Hatsopoulos and Joseph Keenan is more referenced than that of Lewis and Randall. [2]

In the physics community, the 1985 textbook Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics by American physicist Herbert Callen is very popular and is likely the most-referenced modern statistical thermodynamics book. [3] Other famous publications having a direct bearing or influence on human thermodynamics are listed below. Of these, Austrian physicst Erwin Schrödinger's 1944 book What is Life? is one of the most references thermodynamics book in the non-thermodynamics community.

See also
● Most-referenced thermodynamics publication

References
1. (a) Angrist, Stanley W. and Helper, Loren G. (1967). Order and Chaos – Laws of Energy and Entropy, (pg. 27: "most quoted"). New York: Basic Books.
(b) The "most-referenced" book in the reference sections of all of the books in American chemical engineer Libb Thims' 200+ thermodynamics book collection is Lewis and Randall's Thermodynamics.
2. Email communication between Gian Beretta and Libb Thims in circa 2006.
3. (a) Note: the popularity of the 1985 Herbert Callen textbook Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics, the second edition to the 1960 textbook Thermodynamics: an Introduction to the Physical Theories of Equilibrium Thermostatics and Irreversible Thermodynamics, is due in large part to the popularity of Callen’s 1951 paper “Irreversibility and Generalized Noise”, written with Ted A. Welton, which by 1955 had become a “citation classic”, having been cited in over 370 publications.
(b) Staff writer. (1985). “This Week’s Citation Classic”, Current Contents, No. 1, Jan. 07.