Introductory Lecture Delivered in the University of Edinburgh

The first law of thermodynamics deals with the total amount of energy in the universe. It states that this total amount of energy is constant. In other words, there has always been, and always will be, exactly the same amount of energy in the universe. Energy exists in many different forms. According to the first law of thermodynamics, energy may transfer from place to place or transform into different forms, but it cannot be created or destroyed. The transfers and transformations of energy...

How can we compare the energy that releases from one reaction to that of another reaction? We use a measurement of free energy to quantitate these energy transfers. Scientists call this free energy Gibbs free energy (abbreviated with the letter G) after Josiah Willard Gibbs, the scientist who developed the measurement. According to the second law of thermodynamics, all energy transfers involve losing some energy in an unusable form such as heat, resulting in entropy. Gibbs free energy...

A change in the internal energy of a system depends on the the net heat transfer into the system and the net work done by the system. The first law of thermodynamics, which is a generalized form of energy conservation, relates these three quantities mathematically. It states that the change in the internal energy equals the difference between the heat transfer and work done by the system.
The applied heat increases the internal energy of a system. Hence, conventionally heat is considered...

The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. This can be demonstrated within a classic food web where light energy from the sun is harnessed as radiant energy by plants, converted into chemical energy, and stored as complex carbohydrates. The vegetation is then consumed by animals and during the digestion process, the sugars release energy as heat. The sugars also produce chemical energy that either gets used up doing work, stored in...

Energy Conservation

Faraday's law state that the induced emf is the negative change in the magnetic flux per unit of time. Any change in the magnetic field or change in the orientation of the area of the coil with respect to the magnetic field induces a voltage (emf). The magnetic flux measures the number of magnetic field lines through a given surface area. Magnetic flux is estimated from the integral of the dot product of the magnetic field vector and the area vector. The negative sign describes the direction in...