The Joule-Thomson-Maxwell Energy Narrative and Its Repair

In the eighteenth-century, mankind, British inventors among the first, discovered in steam engines a new use of coal fire—the discovery led to the advent in the nineteenth-century of a _science of heat_, a new branch of physics. The core of this science is referred to as the Joule-Thomson-Maxwell energy conversion narrative. The principle of the degradation of energy was central to the energy conversion narrative. The principle and the later entropy principle are closely connected that “entropy and the dissipation of energy are as inseparable as Siamese twins.” But Maxwell has a different take: “the doctrine of the dissipation of energy is closely connected with that of the growth of entropy but is by no means identical with it.” One logical choice of the energy conversion narrative with universal degradation of energy is that the narrative needs a first step initiating the narrative. But insisting _every_ step of the narrative to be energy conversion step, including the starting step of the reversible transformation of chemical mixture into chemical product and work, is mistaking. The paper examines the narrative critically arriving at a conclusion that pinpoints why energy dissipation is “by no means identical with” entropy growth.