Title page of William Thomson's "On the Dynamical Theory of Heat" from Mathematical and Physical Papers. |
“Is it possible to continually get work by abstracting heat from a body till all its heat is removed? Is it possible to get work by cooling a body below the temperature of the medium in which it exists: I believe we may consider a negative answer as axiomatic. Then we deduce the proposition that μ [Carnot’s coefficient] is the same for all substances at a given temperature.”