Nicolas Carnot

1796–1832 · French physicist

Topics: physics, life, creativity

• [T]he production of heat alone is not sufficient to give birth to the impelling power: it is necessary that there should also be cold; without it, the heat would be useless.

  — Nicolas Carnot

• The maximum of motive power resulting from the employment of steam is also the maximum of motive power realizable by any means whatever.1878

  — Nicolas Carnot

• We shall have [a complete theory] only when the laws of Physics shall be extended enough, generalized enough, to make known beforehand all the effects of heat acting in a determined manner on any body.

  — Nicolas Carnot

• There is almost as great a distance between the first apparatus in which the expansive force of steam was displayed and the existing machine, as between the first raft that man ever made and the modern vessel.

  — Nicolas Carnot

• When a hypothesis no longer suffices to explain phenomena, it should be abandoned. This is the case with... caloric as matter, as a subtile fluid.

  — Nicolas Carnot

• Liquuefaction of bodies, solidification of liquids, crystallization—are they not forms of combinations of integrant molecules?

  — Nicolas Carnot

• The Collision of Bodies. ...[I]n the collision of bodies there is always expenditure of motive power. Perfectly elastic bodies only form an exception, and none such are found in nature.

  — Nicolas Carnot

• Notwithstanding the work of all kinds done by steam-engines... their theory is very little understood, and the attempts to improve them are still directed almost by chance.

  — Nicolas Carnot

• I do not know why these two expressions, good sense and common sense, are confounded. There is nothing less common than good sense.

  — Nicolas Carnot

• Yield frequently to the first inspiration. Too much meditation on the same subject ends by suggesting the worst part, or at least causes loss of precious time.

  — Nicolas Carnot

• [[Energy|[M]otive power]] is, in quantity, invariable in nature; that it is, correctly speaking, never either produced or destroyed. It is true that it changes form, that is, it produces sometimes one sort of motion, sometimes another, but it is never annihilated.

  — Nicolas Carnot

• Plan in the morning the work of the day, and reflect in the evening on what has been done.

  — Nicolas Carnot

• Nature, in providing us with combustibles on all sides, has given us the power to produce, at all times and in all places, heat and the impelling power which is the result of it. To develop this power, to appropriate it to our uses, is the object of heat-engines.

  — Nicolas Carnot

• Heat can evidently be a cause of motion only by virtue of the changes of volume or of form which it produces in bodies.

  — Nicolas Carnot