Energy as Master Resource

Abstract

On a spring morning in 1890, the German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald arose early in a Berlin hotel room, preoccupied by a conversation of the previous evening. He had come to Berlin to meet with physicists to discuss his work developing a new theoretical foundation for chemistry, one consistent with the first and second laws of thermodynamics. The first law holds that matter and energy can be neither created nor destroyed, only transformed. The second law states that in any such transformation, the capacity of the energy to do useful work is diminished. The energy does not disappear—the first law—but some of it has become “bound” energy, energy incapable of being useful. In 1865, Rudolf Clausius coined the term entropy as a label for this degraded energy, and it allowed him to state the law succinctly: within any thermodynamically closed system, energy is conserved but entropy must increase.¹