How many principles are in Thermodynamics' theory?

Raffaele PISANO
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

University of Rome, "La Sapienza"


It is known that, in general, in a scientific theory, a principle is an affirmation on which cannot be trace of doubt. It constitutes (even by mean of other principles) the first reference for the development of the whole theory; but, it is also a precise restriction for determining hypothesis to adopt.

Abstract

It is known that, in general, in a scientific theory, a principle is an affirmation on which cannot be trace of doubt. It constitutes (even by mean of other principles) the first reference for the development of the whole theory; but, it is also a precise restriction for determining hypothesis to adopt. In fact, in a theory, the latter cannot violate the conditions imposed by the principles of the theory. Then, one can affirm that a principle in a theory is set as a proposition whose content cannot be disproved neither mathematically shown or experimentally.

In previous works[i], I showed that discursive part of S. Carnot's Réflexions sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu (1824) presents 63 double negated sentences (DNSs); being not equivalent to the corresponding affirmative sentences, they involve a non-classical logic. In total, this kind of analysis shows that S. Carnot consistently follows a theoretical choice of working within non-classical logic.

On the base of these gotten results, in this writing, I will show that Sadi Carnot’s theory contains more than two methodological principles, all of them are expressed by DNS’s belonging to non classical logic; their number is larger than those discovered by historian Philip Lervig in 1976, and those revealed by modern theory.


[i], A. Drago and R. Pisano: interpretazione e ricostruzione delle Réflexions di Sadi Carnot mediante la logica non classica , Giornale di Fisica, (40), pp. 195-217, 2000; S. Carnot’s theory based on non-classical logic in The bulletin Symbolic Logic, A.R. Blass (ed.) (8), 2002.

Info

Raffaele PISANO:
How many pricinciples thermodynamics' theory has?XLII National Congress AIF, Salice Terme, 18-21 October 2004, 203-211.