Timeline of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and random processes

1800-1847

• 1804 - Sir John Leslie observes that a matte black surface radiates heat more effectively than a polished surface, suggesting the importance of black body radiation
• 1805 - William Hyde Wollaston defends the conservation of energy in On the Force of Percussion
• 1808 - atomic weight
• 1810 - Sir John Leslie freezes water to ice artificially
• 1813 - Peter Ewart supports the idea of the conservation of energy in his paper On the measure of moving force; the paper strongly influences Dalton and his pupil, James Joule
• 1819 - Pierre Louis Dulong and crystal
• 1820 - John Herapath develops some ideas in the kinetic theory of gases but mistakenly associates temperature with momentum rather than kinetic energy; his work receives little attention other than from Joule
• 1822 - Joseph Fourier formally introduces the use of dimensions for physical quantities in his Theorie Analytique de la Chaleur
• 1822 - Marc Séguin writes to John Herschel supporting the conservation of energy and kinetic theory
• 1824 - second law of thermodynamics
• 1827 - Robert Brown discovers the Brownian motion of pollen and dye particles in water
• 1831 - Macedonio Melloni demonstrates that black body radiation can be reflected, refracted, and polarised in the same way as light
• 1834 - Émile Clapeyron popularises Carnot's work through a graphical and analytic formulation
• 1841 - Julius Robert von Mayer, an amateur scientist, writes a paper on the conservation of energy, but his lack of academic training leads to its rejection
• 1842 - Mayer makes a connection between work, heat, and the human mechanical equivalent of heat
• 1842 - reversed
• 1843 - John James Waterston fully expounds the kinetic theory of gases, but is ridiculed and ignored
• 1843 - James Joule experimentally finds the mechanical equivalent of heat
• 1846 - Karl-Hermann Knoblauch publishes De calore radiante disquisitiones experimentis quibusdam novis illustratae
• 1846 - Grove publishes an account of the general theory of the conservation of energy in On The Correlation of Physical Forces
• 1847 - first law of thermodynamics

1848-1899

• 1848 - William Thomson extends the concept of absolute zero from gases to all substances
• 1849 - temperature using his hypothesis of molecular vortices
• 1850 - Rankine uses his vortex theory to establish accurate relationships between the temperature, steam will be negative.
• 1850 - second law of thermodynamics, abandoning the caloric theory, but preserving Carnot's principle.
• 1851 - Thomson gives an alternative statement of the second law.
• 1852 - Joule and Thomson demonstrate that a rapidly expanding gas cools, later named the Joule-Thomson effect
• 1854 - Helmholtz puts forward the idea of the heat death of the universe
• 1854 - Clausius establishes the importance of dQ/T (Clausius's theorem), but does not yet name the quantity.
• 1854 - Rankine introduces his thermodynamic function, later identified as entropy
• 1856 - August Krönig publishes an account of the kinetic theory of gases, probably after reading Waterston's work
• 1857 - Clausius gives a modern and compelling account of the kinetic theory of gases in his On the nature of motion called heat
• 1859 - James Clerk Maxwell discovers the distribution law of molecular velocities
• 1859 - black body is a function of only temperature and frequency
• 1865 - Clausius introduces the modern macroscopic concept of entropy
• 1865 - Josef Loschmidt applies Maxwell's theory to estimate the number-density of molecules in gases, given observed gas viscosities.
• 1867 - Maxwell asks whether Maxwell's demon could reverse irreversible processes
• 1870 - Clausius proves the scalar virial theorem
• 1872 - H-theorem
• 1874 - Thomson formally states the second law of thermodynamics.
• 1876 - chemical thermodynamics in general.
• 1876 - Loschmidt criticises Boltzmann's H theorem as being incompatible with microscopic reversibility (Loschmidt's paradox).
• 1877 - Boltzmann states the relationship between entropy and probability.
• 1879 - Jožef Stefan observes that the total radiant flux from a blackbody is proportional to the fourth power of its temperature and states the Stefan-Boltzmann law.
• 1884 - Boltzmann derives the Stefan-Boltzmann blackbody radiant flux law from thermodynamic considerations.
• 1888 - principle that the response of a chemical system perturbed from equilibrium will be to counteract the perturbation.
• 1889 - Nernst equation.
• 1889 - Arrhenius equation.
• 1893 - Wilhelm Wien discovers the displacement law for a blackbody's maximum specific intensity.

1900-1944

• 1900 - law of black-body radiation
• 1905 - Albert Einstein argues that the reality of quanta would explain the photoelectric effect
• 1905 - Einstein mathematically analyzes Brownian motion as a result of random molecular motion
• 1906 - Nernst presents a formulation of the third law of thermodynamics
• 1907 - Einstein uses quantum theory to estimate the heat capacity of an Einstein solid
• 1909 - Constantin Carathéodory develops an axiomatic system of thermodynamics
• 1910 - Einstein and Marian Smoluchowski find the Einstein-Smoluchowski formula for the attenuation coefficient due to density fluctuations in a gas
• 1911 - Paul Ehrenfest and Tatjana Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa publish their classical review on the statistical mechanics of Boltzmann, Begriffliche Grundlagen der statistischen Auffassung in der Mechanik
• 1912 - improved heat capacity estimate by allowing low-frequency phonons
• 1916 - Sydney Chapman and David Enskog systematically develop the kinetic theory of gases.
• 1916 - Einstein considers the thermodynamics of stimulated emission
• 1919 - James Jeans discovers that the dynamical constants of motion determine the distribution function for a system of particles
• 1920 - Megh Nad Saha states his ionization equation
• 1923 - Debye and electrolytes
• 1924 - Bose-Einstein statistics, in a paper translated by Einstein
• 1926 - fermions
• 1927 - John von Neumann introduces the density matrix representation and establishes quantum statistical mechanics
• 1928 - John B. Johnson discovers Johnson noise in a resistor
• 1928 - Harry Nyquist derives the fluctuation-dissipation relationship for a resistor to explain Johnson noise
• 1929 - Onsager reciprocal relations
• 1942 - Joseph Leo Doob states his theorem on Gauss-Markov processes
• 1944 - Onsager gives an analytic solution to the 2D phase transition

1945-present

• 1948 - Claude Elwood Shannon establishes information theory.
• 1957 - Aleksandr Solomonovich Kompaneets derives his Compton scattering Fokker-Planck equation.
• 1957 - Ryogo Kubo derives the first of the Green-Kubo relations for linear transport coefficients.
• 1957 - Edwin T. Jaynes gives MaxEnt interpretation of thermodynamics from information theory.
• 1972 - Jacob Bekenstein suggests that black holes have an entropy proportional to their surface area.
• 1974 - Stephen Hawking predicts that black holes will radiate particles with a black-body spectrum which can cause black hole evaporation

See also

• History of physics
• History of thermodynamics
• List of notable textbooks in statistical mechanics
• Physics
• Thermodynamics
• Parmenides influence on the development of thermodynamics