Three forms of energy

摘要

Thermodynamics is of fundamental importance to chemistry. Over one hundred papers in this Journal show the appreciation of this importance by the chemical community in the last five years. Reference to only a few of these papers is given here (1-9). The importance of reactions that are primarily carried out for the production of energy and the principles used to work out the quantity of energy released are well known. Of no less importance are the fundamental principles relating to entropy and the free energy of reactions to determine the spontaneity of reactions and even the equilibrium constant (10,11).