The Thermodynamic Machinery of Life

Thermodynamics was created in the first half of the 19th century as a theory designed to explain the functioning of heat engines converting heat into mechanical work. In the course of time, while the scope of research in this field was being extended to a wider and wider class of energy transformations, thermodynamics came to be considered as a general theory of machines identified with energy transducers. Imp- tant progress in biochemistry in the first half of the 20th century, and in mole...