On the Conservation of Force
by Hermann von Helmholtz · Über die Erhaltung der Kraft
Assigned by 1 of the 9 reading lists, catalogue entry only
- Written
- 1862
- Language
- German
- Length
- Short · 35 ppunder 120 pages
- Difficulty
- Demanding3 of 5 for a first-year reader
We recommendScience and Culture: Popular and Philosophical EssaysUniversity of Chicago Press, 1995David Cahan's collection prints Helmholtz's popular lectures in readable English; the Harvard Classics volume 30 reprints this one with Ice and Glaciers.
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A popular lecture introducing the principle Helmholtz had first stated mathematically in 1847. He starts from the long failure of attempts to build a perpetual motion machine and argues that this failure is not accidental but expresses a law: the quantity of force, what we now call energy, in an isolated system cannot be increased or destroyed, only converted. He traces the conversions through falling weights, springs, heat, electricity and chemical action, gives the mechanical equivalent of heat, and applies the principle to the steam engine, to animal bodies fed by food and to the sun's supply of heat to the earth.
No reading guide yet
The catalogue entry above is complete: the dates, the form, the themes and every program that assigns On the Conservation of Force are verified against each program's published list.
What is missing is the part that takes real work: the summary, the key passages, and a recommended translation. The edition named below is the one most programs assign, so the buy links are useful already.
