Gibbs articles
Evangelos Bertakis
This group is seriously silent. However, I came across something that
I guess is of interest: the very original publications of J.W. Gibbs,
the very same person that is responsible for all our efforts to
calculate the "Gibbs energy", that Gibbs himself back in 1873 quite
modestly named "dissipated energy" :-)
You can find the articles here:
http://groups.google.com/group/fortran-thermo-math/files
My first impression of the articles was manifold: On one hand side, I
was amazed by how many terms (e.g. entropy) were comfortably in use
134 years ago. At the same time, I had a hard time recognizing the
terms that we use today. E.g., the Gibbs energy: I had to consult
Wikipedia (see below) to be able to find the diagram that actually
defined it for the first time (you can find it in pg. 402 of "Gibbs
method geometrical representation thermodynamic properties surfaces
1873.pdf"). Wikipedia has a snapshot of the diagram in the respective
article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_energy
Additionally, I noticed that almost for every thing that he used he
had to provide a proof, whereas today we would easily site someone
else (or not mention anything at all), see for example his attempt to
verbally describe a method of numerical integration in pg. 313 of
"Gibbs graphical methods in the thermodynamics of fluids 1873.pdf".
Only after I noticed this, I noticed that in more than 200 pages worth
of articles, there are only a couple citations (!). However, Gibbs
refers to "Prof. Clausius" many times in his work!
Have fun,
Vangelis