We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
A Universal Definition of Work.
- Authors
Scheer, Bradley T.
- Abstract
The article informs about the precise meaning of the term work in relation to its popular sense of effort expended and its elementary physical sense of the product of force and distance. It is reported that the universal definition of work is the activity which is done by any process that increases the potential energy and decreases the entropy of a system. It is thus stated that if a given system may exist in Wnpossible states, and if these are random states in the sense that the probabilities of occurrence of all states are equal, then the probability Pnof any one state is given by Pn = 0<l/Wn<1. The article also informs about quantitative definition of work in terms of Helmholtz' free-energy.
- Subjects
WORK (Mechanics); FORCE &; energy; QUANTUM entropy; LINEAR free energy relationship; HELMHOLTZ equation; SURFACE energy; SYSTEMS theory; MATHEMATICAL statistics; PROBABILITY theory
- Publication
BioScience, 1976, Vol 26, Issue 8, p505
- ISSN
0006-3568
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/bioscience/26.8.505