ABSTRACT
Thermodynamics, the physical theory of heat as developed by Rumford, Carnot, Clausius, and others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while based on no new laws of nature, was a tremendously successful phenomenological theory that described universal regularities in the behavior of macroscopic matter. The importance of the development of thermodynamics was clear, for as Herbert Callen puts it, the properties of macroscopic matter provide the interface between scientists and nature. 3 If a reductionist description of the physical universe with Newtonian mechanics at its core was to be successful, thermodynamics would have to be shown to be an epiphenomenal result of the laws of Newtonian mechanics. While there have been many brilliant attempts at achieving this, the most notable being the introduction of the use of statistics in physics by Maxwell and Boltzmann, none has been wholly successful.
