2 Quotes & Sayings By Lazare Carnot
Lazare Carnot was born on June 8, 1753, in Nolay, France. His father was a miller and his mother taught him to read at an early age. He entered the École Polytechnique (Paris) in 1774 and graduated in 1778, at the age of seventeen. He became an engineer officer in the French army and participated in the Seven Years' War (1756-1763)
In 1791, he gave a course of lectures on mechanics that were published five years later. This book laid the foundation for his final achievement: The Refutation of All Physics and Astronomy (1824). It was a truly monumental work: 1,200 pages long, it contained the refutation of all physics and astronomy.
Professor Carnot used five hundred pages to prove that thermodynamics is contrary to experience and observation; only a few pages were left for his refutation of all physics. In this book he demonstrated that heat is not a material entity but a form or "mode" of motion; that it is not conserved but increases when objects are in contact; that there is no such thing as absolute rest or absolute motion; that a reversible process has a corresponding area in which the process is reversible; that the heat capacity of bodies does not depend on their temperature but on their volume; that there is no such thing as specific heats for different substances; and so forth. To prove all this he used hundreds of experiments from his own shop and from other laboratories around Paris.
He also demonstrated with mathematical formulas how changes in temperature or volume could produce changes in temperature or volume within a system. In this book he also proved that there is no such thing as an absolute rate of change, no such thing as an absolute quantity, and no such thing as an absolute state of motion or rest. The result was a complete refutation of all physics and astronomy based upon experimental data from everyday life.
This book marks the end of the eighteenth century's traditional explanations of physical phenomena by means of mechanics alone without reference to experience or observation. It also marks the beginning of thermodynamics as an independent science based upon experimental data concerned with material properties irrespective of their causes or origins.