the second law of thermodynamics was discovered in 1824.
when was the second law of thermodynamics discovered?
1824
circa 1797, count rumford (born benjamin thompson) showed that endless mechanical action can generate indefinitely large amounts of heat from a fixed amount of working substance thus challenging the caloric theory of heat, which held that there would be a finite amount of caloric heat/energy in a fixed amount of working substance. the first established thermodynamic principle, which eventually became the second law of thermodynamics, was formulated by sadi carnot in 1824. by 1860, as formalized in the works of those such as rudolf clausius and william thomson, two established principles of thermodynamics had evolved, the first principle and the second principle, later restated as thermodynamic laws. by 1873, for example, thermodynamicist josiah willard gibbs, in his memoir "graphical methods in the thermodynamics of fluids", clearly stated the first two absolute laws of thermodynamics. some textbooks throughout the 20th century have numbered the laws differently. in some fields removed from chemistry, the second law was considered to deal with the efficiency of heat engines only, whereas what was called the third law dealt with entropy increases. directly defining zero points for entropy calculations was not considered to be a law. gradually, this separation was combined into the second law and the modern third law was widely adopted.
laws of thermodynamics
the second law is the statement of hawking's area theorem. analogously, the second law of thermodynamics states that the change in entropy in an isolated system will be greater than or equal to 0 for a spontaneous process, suggesting a link between entropy and the area of a black-hole horizon. however, this version violates the second law of thermodynamics by matter losing (its) entropy as it falls in, giving a decrease in entropy. however, generalizing the second law as the sum of black-hole entropy and outside entropy, shows that the second law of thermodynamics is not violated in a system including the universe beyond the horizon.
black hole thermodynamics