In chemical thermodynamics, John Alfred Valentine Butler (1899-1977), oft-cited “J.A.V. Butler”, and known to his friends and colleagues as “J.A.V” (Ѻ), was an English physical chemist noted for his 1935 textbook The Fundamentals of Chemical Thermodynamics, which uniquely focused on thermodynamic applications in electrochemistry, and his later 1940s to 1970 attempts to understand the "life process" via thermodynamics. [1] See main: Animate thermodynamicsIn his 1946 article "Life and the Second Law of Thermodynamics" Butler outlined William Thomson's 1852 view of the second law, a view which he summarized by stating that Thomson "expressly excluded the operations of animate agencies" from the second law, which is not exactly correct; but, nevertheless, also discussed the recent views on thermodynamics and life expressed by Gilbert Lewis (1926) and Erwin Schrodinger (1944); the abstract of which is as follows: [4]
“Whether life processes obey the second law of thermodynamics or if life finds a way of evading the otherwise universal dissipation of energy has been something of a puzzle for a century. Kelvin left the matter open in his formulation of the second law, by expressly excluding the operations of ‘animate agencies’. Since then, opinions on both sides have been expressed, although a majority would probably be found in favour of the view that any local increase of ‘free’ energy is compensated by a greater amount of dissipation elsewhere, or as Schrödinger has recently put it in picturesque if somewhat inaccurate language, the organism feeds on ‘negative entropy’. On the other hand, G. N. Lewis referred to living organisms as “cheats in the game of entropy”, which “alone seem able to breast the great stream of apparently irreversible processes. These processes tear down, living things build up. While the rest of the world seems to move towards a dead level of uniformity, the living organism is evolving new substances and more and more intricate forms.”
“The credit for connecting electrochemical thermodynamics and kinetics must go to English physical chemist John Butler (1899-1977). He, along with German surface chemist Max Volmer (1885-1965), and Hungarian physical chemist Erdey-Gruz Tibor (1902-1976), laid the seeds of the phenomenological basis of electrochemical kinetics.”— Ashok Shukla (2008), “Pillars of Modern Electrochemistry” (Ѻ)