The First Law Of Thermodynamics Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 690):

The First Law is simply the statement that the total energy is conserved in any isolated system. … The first law makes it explicit that the total energy is not lost when, say, a body loses its kinetic energy as it slows down because of air resistance. For this energy is simply taken up in heating the air and the body. This heat energy is understood as (primarily) kinetic energy in the motions of air molecules and vibrations of particles composing the body. Moreover, temperature is simply a measure of energy per degree of freedom, so the thermodynamic notions of heat and temperature are basically the same as previously understood dynamical notions, but applied at the level of the individual constituents of materials and treated in a statistical way. The First Law has the kind of precision that we are familiar with: the value of something, namely the total energy, remains constant despite the fact that all kinds of complicated processes may be taking place. The total energy after the process is equal to the total energy before the process.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, potential energy is the capacity of a process to unfold, and kinetic energy, for example, is the instantiation of that potential. In this view, the First Law of thermodynamics states that the total capacity for processes to unfold is conserved in any isolated system.