Democritus and the motive power of fire

The present work is a translation from french to english of our previous “Démocrite et la puissance motrice du feu”, amended on a number of respects. It is mainly of historical and pedagogical interest. We suggest that the concepts introduced in the ancien Greece by Anaximander (flat earth) and Democritus (corpuscles moving in vacuum) allow us to obtain through qualitative observations and plausible generalizations the maximum efficiency and work of heat engines, results that were firmly established around 1824 by Carnot. A prologue introduces the subject. We next present the concept of thermal equilibrium and consider a model consisting of two reservoirs located at different altitudes, each with g sites. Each site may contain a specified number of corpuscles. One particular site plays the role of “working agent”. We subsequently consider an alternative model consisting of independent corpuscles submitted to gravity and in contact with heat baths. Only average quantities are considered, leaving out fluctuations and questions of stability. This painting by Chardin illustrates the “parti pris des choses” (Francis Ponge) adopted by Anaximander and Democritus in the ancient Greece. Aristotle notes that “Democritus omits to consider final causes and thus brings back to necessity every action of nature.” One can fancy that the Chardin painting represents three corpuscles and two sites, one being able to contain only few corpuscles, the other being able to contain many. ha l-0 05 83 10 0, v er si on 2 7 O ct 2 01 2