Left: a generic model idealization of an ideal gas in a frictionless piston and cylinder. Right: A 1663 vacuum pump (bottom part), showing the vacuum bulb (top part), the third design of the vacuum pump by German engineer Otto Guericke, the prototype behind Robert Boyle's pneumatical engine, through which Boyle's law was arrived at, and, in turn, the other various gas laws, culminating in the ideal gas law. Both being models used by hmolscience scholars into the 20th century to model society. A more accurate model is the van't Hoff equilibrium box, such as discussed in American chemical thermodynamicist Frederick Rossini's famous 1971 "Chemical Thermodynamics in the Real World". |
“We ought to be able to foresee the general character of the future history of mankind. The operation of the laws of probability should tend to produce something like certainty. We may, so to speak, reasonably hope to find the Boyle's law which controls the behavior of those very complicated molecules, the members of the human race, and from this we should be able to predict something of man's future.”— C.G. Darwin (1952), “Introduction” to The Next Million Years
“I was struck by a remark made by an old teacher of mine at Harvard, Edwin Bidwell Wilson. Wilson was the last student of J. Willard Gibbs' at Yale and had worked creatively in many fields of mathematics and physics; his advanced calculus was a standard text for decades; his was the definitive write-up of Gibbs' lectures on vectors; he wrote one of the earliest texts on aerodynamics; he was a friend of R. A. Fisher and an expert on mathematical statistics and demography; finally, he had become interested early in the work of Pareto and gave lectures in mathematical economics at Harvard. My earlier formulation of the inequality in Eq. 4:
owed much to Wilson's lectures on thermodynamics. In particular, I was struck by his statement that the fact that an increase in pressure is accompanied by a decrease in volume is not so much a theorem about a thermodynamic equilibrium system as it is a mathematical theorem about surfaces that are concave from below or about negative definite quadratic forms. Armed with this clue, I set out to make sense of the Le Chatelier principle.”