THERMORDYNAMICS

The study of heat and its transformation to mechanical energy is called thermodynamics (which stems
from Greek words meaning movement of heat). The science of thermodynamics was developed in the
early nineteenth century, before the atomic and molecular theory of matter was undersrood. Because
the earty workers in thermodynamics had only vague notions of atoms, and knew nothing about
electrons and other microscopic particles, the models they used invoked macroscopic notions