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Back to The Little Heat Engine
This essay on The Little Heat Engine was written in order to help provide an understanding of thermodynamics. The Little Heat Engine is telling us that the internal processes involved in heat transfer cannot be ignored. However, modern courses in classical thermodynamics neglect the internal workings of the system. In large part, this is because the fathers of thermodynamics (men like Kirchhoff, Gibbbs and Claussius) did not understand the internal workings of the system. As such, they had no choice but to treat the entire system.
One sees in the essay on the Little Heat Engine that Stephan's Law of Emission does not hold for liquids and gases. This is a reflection that these two states of matter have other available degrees of freedom. For instance, if Stephan's Law had held, solids would have no need to melt. They could keep dealing with the heat easily, simply by emitting photons in a manner proportional with the fourth power of the temperature. The Little Heat Engine is telling us that statistical thermodynamics must be applied when dealing with thermal emission.
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