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Gibbs's Paper II: equilibrium, stability, metastability, phases, critical points, and exergy

Zhigang Suo's picture

Paper II.  A METHOD OF GEOMETRICAL REPRESENTATION OF THE THERMODYNAMIC PROPERTIES OF SUBSTANCES BY MEANS OF SURFACES, 1873


Gibbs discovered a picture of extraordinary beauty and simplicity.  He devoted Paper II to describing this picture in words, with few equations.  The specific picture did not appear in the paper, did appear in a later textbook by Maxwell, and has been purged from nearly all modern textbooks.  But Gibbs’s main ideas have prospered.  They constitute the thermodynamic theory of equilibrium, stability, metastability, phases, critical points, and exergy.  He described all the essentials in this remarkable paper of twenty-some pages. This review continues at Amazon.

You can download a pdf file of the book for free at Google Books.

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