2024 'Key Reflections' on the 1824 Sadi Carnot's 'Reflexions' and 200 Year Legacy

TL;DR

This paper offers a detailed analysis of Sadi Carnot's original reasoning and legacy in thermodynamics, emphasizing novel insights and generalizations from an engineering perspective, and contextualizing his work within early 19th-century scientific understanding.

Contribution

It presents original logical reflections and generalizations of Carnot's reasoning, highlighting their significance in the development of thermodynamics from an engineering standpoint.

Findings

Carnot's reasoning inferred subsequent thermodynamic principles.

Historical context clarifies early misconceptions about heat and energy.

Novel generalizations extend Carnot's original insights.

Abstract

This author is not a philosopher nor historian of science, but an engineering thermodynamicist. In that regard and in addition to various philosophical "why & how" treatises and existing historical analyses, the physical and logical "what it is" reflections, as sequential Key Points, where a key Sadi Carnot's reasoning infers the next one, along with novel contributions and original generalizations, are presented. We need to keep in mind that in Sadi Carnot's time (early 1800s) the steam engines were inefficient (below 5%, so the heat in and out were comparable within experimental uncertainty, as if caloric were conserved), the conservation of caloric flourished (might be a fortunate misconception leading to the critical analogy with the waterwheel), and many critical thermal-concepts, including the conservation of energy (The First Law) were not even established. Since Clausius and Kelvin earned to be "Fathers of thermodynamics," then Sadi Carnot was 'the ingenious' "Forefather of thermodynamics-to-become".