Page:Scientific Papers of Josiah Willard Gibbs.djvu/32

xxiv triumphant use in the last three chapters shows that such purely mechanical systems as he has been considering will exhibit, to human perception, properties in all respects analogous to those which we actually meet with in thermodynamics. No one can understandingly read the thirteenth chapter without the keenest delight, as one after another of the familiar formulæ of thermodynamics appear almost spontaneously, as it seems, from the consideration of purely mechanical systems. But it is characteristic of the author that he should be more impressed with the limitations and imperfections of his work than with its successes; and he is careful to say (p. 166): "But it should be distinctly stated, that if the results obtained when the numbers of degrees of freedom are enormous coincide sensibly with the general laws of thermodynamics, however interesting and significant this coincidence may be, we are still far from having explained the phenomena of nature with respect to these laws. For, as compared with the case of nature, the systems which we have considered are of a ideal simplicity. Although our only assumption is that we are considering conservative systems of a finite number of degrees of freedom, it would seem that this is assuming far too much, so far as the bodies of nature are concerned. The phenomena of radiant heat, which certainly should not be neglected in any complete system of thermodynamics, and the electrical phenomena associated with the combination of atoms, seem to show that the hypothesis of a finite number of degrees of freedom is inadequate for the explanation of the properties of bodies." While this is undoubtely true, it should also be remembered that, in no department of physics have the phenomena of nature been explained with the completeness that is here indicated as desirable. In the theories of electricty, of light, even in mechanics itself, only certain phenomena are considered which really never occur alone. In the present state of knowledge, such partial explanations are the best that can be got, and, in addition, the problem of rational thermodynamics has, historically, always been regarded in this way. In a matter of such difficulty no positive statement should be made, but it is the belief of the present writer that the problem, as it has always been understood, has been successfully solved in this work; and if this belief is correct, one of the great deficiencies in the scientific record of the nineteenth century has been supplied in the first year of the twentieth.

In methods and results, this part of the work is more general than any preceding treatment of the subject; it is in no sense a tratise on the kinetic theory of gases, and the results obtained are not the properties of any one form of matter, but the general equations of thermodynamics which belong to all forms alike. This corresponds to the generality of the hypothesis in which nothing is assumed as to