We review aspects of Afanassjewa’s work on the foundations of thermodynamics from her 1925 paper on the Second Law and her 1956 book Grundlagen der Thermodynamik. We argue that her work contained several valuable original insights in these foundations, often much ahead of her times. In particular, we discuss how her 1956 book anticipated and showed the way to solve an alleged paradox about reversible processes raised by Norton (2014, 2016) and discuss the remarkable comments in her 1925 paper on the asymmetry between work and heat exchange —which still awaits more common recognition—, and on the conceptual possibility of negative absolute temperatures, long before Ramsey (1956) made this an accepted physical possibility.
Afanassjewa and the Foundations of Thermodynamics
G. Valente
2021-01-01
Abstract
We review aspects of Afanassjewa’s work on the foundations of thermodynamics from her 1925 paper on the Second Law and her 1956 book Grundlagen der Thermodynamik. We argue that her work contained several valuable original insights in these foundations, often much ahead of her times. In particular, we discuss how her 1956 book anticipated and showed the way to solve an alleged paradox about reversible processes raised by Norton (2014, 2016) and discuss the remarkable comments in her 1925 paper on the asymmetry between work and heat exchange —which still awaits more common recognition—, and on the conceptual possibility of negative absolute temperatures, long before Ramsey (1956) made this an accepted physical possibility.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
