Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/349

Rh as to the fact appears for the most part in the invariability of the ratio of any dynamic magnitude of a definite kind which disappears to that of another kind which is thereby produced, and the numerical value of which, for a particular transformation, depends only on the relative magnitude of the characteristic units as compared by the same standard system of dynamic units. That is, that the conversion of one manifestation of energy into another takes place with as great certainty and absence of waste, and with the same integrity of the elementary magnitude, as the more formal conversion of foot-pounds into kilogrammetres, or British thermal units into calorics. To the experimental establishment of this principle as involved in transformations between heat and work, and which is called the First Fundamental Law of Thermo-Dynamics, we shall return hereafter.

But in the transformation of heat into mechanical effect or work, an additional principle has been found to hold, respecting the transformable quantities of these two magnitudes as influenced by temperature, and which is known in like manner as the Second Fundamental Law of Thermo-Dynamics.

Experience has not as yet encountered any phenomena at variance with these fundamental laws; which furthermore agree with the strictest requirements of intuitive science, and illustrate, respectively, the axioms that nothing is by natural means creatable from nothing, and that things are equal to the same thing only which are equal to each other. In the development of these two principles, and the application to them of empirical laws with reference to the behavior of bodies under the action of heat or mechanical effect, consists the first principal division of the subject in which the results obtained are generally reliable.

But in assuming a complete analogy between molecular and mass energy, and in tracing the consequence of this assumption through the different forms of material aggregation, the conclusions reached are generally much beyond the present power of experimental science to explicitly confirm, and, although many of the results obtained in these investigations are of great probability, they yet are of inferior certainty to those properly included in the first division.

In short, although the laws which govern the relations of molar energy to heat are in the abstract positively known, yet in endeavoring to trace the distribution and precise condition of energy when it becomes absorbed within a body, or vice versa, the mode and minutest detail of its transformation into gross mechanical effect, the most consistent theories have heretofore depended on the hypothesis that actual or real heat is a condition of molecular kinetic energy, and that the various latent heats are due to potentialities of molecular arrangement.

The full extent to which this principle of the indestructibility of