Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/34

 the Philosophical Transactions, he concluded that De la Roche and Bérard's value was too large; and predicted that the true specific heat of air would be found to be 0.2378. Three years later Regnault obtained by direct experiment the value 0.2377.

Soon after this he moved to Glasgow, and founded there the firm of Rankine and Thomson civil engineers. They took up a scheme for supplying the City of Glasgow with water from Loch Katrine. They were not the originators of the scheme, but they were successful in carrying it out. The City of Glasgow solved effectively the problem of an abundant supply of pure water; and in so doing commenced a career which has made it the model municipality of the British Islands. As a resident of Glasgow he became an active member of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow; and to that Society he contributed in 1853 one of his most important memoirs "The general law of the transformation of energy." Two years later he contributed "Outlines of the science of energetics," on the abstract theory of physical phenomena in general, which has now become the logical foundation for any treatise on physics. In it he introduces and defines exactly a number of terms which were then strange or altogether new, but are now familiar concepts in physical science, such as "actual energy" and "potential energy."

To the doctrines of the Conservation and Transformation of Energy, Prof. William Thomson added the doctrine of the dissipation of energy. This doctrine asserts that there exists in nature a tendency to the dissipation or uniform diffusion of mechanical energy originally collected in stored up form; in consequence of which the solar system (and the whole visible universe) tends towards a state of uniformly diffused heat; in which state according to the laws of thermodynamics no further transformation of energy is possible; in other words, nature tends towards a state of universal death. Rankine speculated as to how this dire result may be provided against in nature, and contributed to the meeting of the British Association, held at Belfast in 1852 a paper "On the reconcentration of the mechanical energy of the universe." "My object,"