Introduction From Metaphors to Models of Heat

Abstract

Traditional courses treat thermodynamics in a form unlike anything else known in physics. In particular, we are told that it is a theory of the equilibrium of heat and not of how and how fast things happen in real life. This combines with the conceptualization of heat as energy (or a form of energy) and thermal processes as the result of the motion of little particles. The result is a theory that uses strange d’s in its equations, does not produce initial value problems as we know them from the rest of physics, and introduces concepts such as exergy, enthalpy, free energy, and Gibbs free energy, we are hard put to distinguish from energy and entropy and from each other.