Other formulations followed quickly, and Kelvin in particular understood some of the law’s general implications. The Second Law was originally formulated in terms of the fact that heat does not spontaneously flow from a colder body to a hotter. Around 1850 Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson ( Kelvin) stated both the First Law - that total energy is conserved - and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The relation between heat and energy was important for the development of steam engines, and in 1824 Sadi Carnot had captured some of the ideas of thermodynamics in his discussion of the efficiency of an idealized engine. Experiments by James Joule and others in the 1840s put this in doubt, and finally in the 1850s it became accepted that heat is in fact a form of energy. But in the 1700s it became widely believed that heat was instead a separate fluid-like substance. Basic physical notions of heat and temperature were established in the 1600s, and scientists of the time appear to have thought correctly that heat is associated with the motion of microscopic constituents of matter. Section: Irreversibility and the Second Law of Thermodynamics From: Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science
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