William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin - Mechanical Quotes

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Any restoration of mechanical energy, without more than an equivalent of dissipation, is impossible in inanimate material processes, and is probably never effected by means of organized matter, either endowed with vegetable life, or subjected to the will of an animated creature.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
A perfect thermo-dynamic engine is such that, whatever amount of mechanical effect it can derive from a certain thermal agency; if an equal amount be spent in working it backwards, an equal reverse thermal effect will be produced.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
It is conceivable that animal life might have the attribute of using the heat of surrounding matter, at its natural temperature, as a source of energy for mechanical effect.... The influence of animal or vegetable life on matter is infinitely beyond the range of any scientific enquiry hitherto entered on. Its power of directing the motions of moving particles, in the demonstrated daily miracle of our human free-will, and in the growth of generation after generation of plants from a single seed, are infinitely different from any possible result of the fortuitous concurrence of atoms.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
When 'thermal agency' is thus spent in conducting heat through a solid, what becomes of the mechanical effect which it might produce? Nothing can be lost in the operations of nature—no energy can be destroyed.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Although mechanical energy is indestructible, there is a universal tendency to its dissipation, which produces throughout the system a gradual augmentation and diffusion of heat, cessation of motion, and exhaustion of the potential energy of the material Universe.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
It is impossible by means of inanimate material agency to derive a mechanical effect from a portion of matter by cooling it below the temperature of the coldest surrounding bodies.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
We may consequently regard it as certain that, neither by natural agencies of inanimate matter, nor by the operations arbitrarily effected by animated Creatures, can there be any change produced in the amount of mechanical energy in the Universe.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
There is at present in the material world a universal tendency to the dissipation of mechanical energy.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Considering it as thus established, that heat is not a substance, but a dynamical form of mechanical effect, we perceive that there must be an equivalence between mechanical work and heat, as between cause and effect.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
It is impossible, by means of inanimate material agency, to derive mechanical effect from any portion of matter by cooling it below the temperature of the coldest of the surrounding objects.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
There must be something in this molecular hypothesis and that as a mechanical symbol it is certainly not a mere hypothesis, but a reality.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
I never satisfy myself until I can make a mechanical model of a thing. If I can make a mechanical model, I understand it.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin