# Mechanical engineering

In engineering, mechanical engineering is the study of energy conversion, mechanics, and mechanism and devices for diverse applications, ranging from automotive parts to nanomachines. [1]

Human thermodynamics
The following, culled from the HT pioneers page, are noted mechanical engineers to have ventured into human thermodynamics theory formulations:

 Mechanical engineer Date Significance 1. Bryan Donkin (1836-1902)English mechanical engineer 1893 His article-book “The Scientific Work of Gustav Adolph Hirn”, on the life, work, and thermodynamics philosophy of French physicist Gustave Hirn, coined the term "human thermodynamics" and gave the first summary of the subject overview of the subject. 2. Robert Thurston (1839-1903) American mechanical engineer 1894 In his The Animal as a Machine and Prime Motor: and the Laws of Energetics, speculated on a future possible law of persistence of existence, in relation to the energy or force aspects of the soul. 3. Mehdi Bazargan (1907-1995)Iranian mechanical engineer and thermodynamicist 1942 $W = U - TS \,$|||| Completed his PhD in thermodynamics (1930s); wrote on “The Thermodynamics of Love” (c.1942); in his Labor in Islam (1946), wrote a chapter on physiological thermodynamics of human labor in the context of will power; during a five-month prison spell (for political opposition), wrote the Human Thermodynamics (1956), the first book entitled “human thermodynamics”, wherein he used a thermodynamics based framework, in particular Helmholtz free energy equation (adjacent) to explain Islam, work, death, desire, love, and reincarnation scientifically. 4. Gordon Van Wylen (1920-)American mechanical engineer 1959 Wrote a thermodynamics textbook, co-authored American mechanical engineer Richard Sonntag (1933-2010), with an appended a two-page section to their entropy chapter on general comments regarding entropy and some of its philosophical aspects, asking questions such as 'how did the universe get into a law entropy state?' or 'are there processes unknown to us that occur somewhere in the universe, such as continual creation, that have a decrease in entropy associated with them, and thus offset the continual increase in entropy with the natural processes that are known to us?', or 'is the second law valid for the entire universe?', with the concluding remark: “The second law of thermodynamics is man’s description of the prior and continuing work of a creator, who also holds the answer to the future destiny of man and the universe.” 5. Roy Henderson (c.1935-)Australian mechanical engineer 1971 |Modeled of crowd behavior and pedestrian traffic on fluid mechanics and ideal gas models; in his first paper, the highly-cited 1971 “The Statistics of Crowd Fluids”, he measured the movements of college students on a campus and children on a playground, finding that in both cases their movements fit the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. 6. John Bryant (1944-)English mechanical engineer and business consultant 1979 Began thinking about the relationship between the cost of oil, energy, and thermodynamics in the 1970s; published articles such as “A Thermodynamic Approach to Economics” (1982), and a 2009 book Thermoeconomics: A Thermodynamic Approach to Economics, all making crude isomorphism extrapolations of thermodynamic equations and variables to economics. 7. Louis-Marie Vincent (c.1940-)French electromechanical engineer and biophysical chemist 1988 |||His book Can We Believe in Resurrection, which speculates on life and death in a modern scientific context, arguing that “the brain is a machine that obeys the laws of thermodynamics”, albeit he argues, in a detractive sense, that soul is a type of quantum field attached to superluminal particles; has theories on how love is a form of thermodynamic potential, that may be converted into heat and movement, and how the brain, being comprised of matter and energy, thus obeying the laws of matter and the laws of thermodynamics, may act in a “change of state” of energy at the time of death; his 2002 book Other Logic of Living, uses physical methods, such as information and analysis of form, to model the living being as a whole and to argue that “not only do we not really know what life is, but we are not quite sure what death is either.” 8. Ronald Pearson (c.1933-)American mechanical engineer and thermodynamicist 1990 His book Intelligence behind the Universe, argues for an ‘intelligent ether’ theory of continued consciousness after death, which supposedly originated from his 1984 rejection of big bang theory as being a violation of the conservation of energy. 9. Valter Caggio (1954-)Italian mechanical engineer 1991 ||||||In 1991, began giving lectures in which he advised the incorporation of negentropy logic and thinking into the humanities; in circa 2004 laugned the sites: Negentropy.us, Negentropie.com, and Negentropia.com; his 2008 book Negentropy and its New Global Meaning, attempts to use the negentropy concept as a universal model to explain psychology, ethics, economics, politics, philosophy, and religions. 10. Bill Nye (1955-)American mechanical engineer 1993 |Summarized the subject of human thermodynamics as historical attempts to use the laws of thermodynamics to explain various facets of human existence, from car wreck behaviors, to politics, to the process of falling in love. 11. Christopher Edwards (c.1959-)American mechanical engineer and thermodynamicist 1995 In his thermodynamics class, at Stanford University, he teaches his students at that life is a path function:“Life is a path function. You begin life, you end life—that's not so interesting, right? But quality of life is a path function. It's the path that you take from the beginning to the end, the integral of that path, that's the special part.” 12. Satish Boregowda (c.1968-)American mechanical engineer 1998 His PhD dissertation Thermodynamic Modeling and Analysis of Stress Responses, attempts to quantify human stress thermodynamically, namely to use the second law to examine two types of stressors: thermal stress and mental stress; his 2005 article “Modeling of Human Physiological Stresses: A Thermodynamics-based Approach”, co-written with Waldemar Karwowski, expands on this using Maxwell relations to develop formulas to quantify human stress due to the artifact-human interactions. 13. Josip Stepanic (1970-) Croatian physicist and mechanical engineer 2000 $\tilde{U} = \tilde{G} + \sum_i \tilde{f}_i \tilde{x}_i + \tilde{T} \tilde{S} \,$In his “Approach to a Quantitative Description of Social Systems Based on Thermodynamic Formalism”, outlines a toy model of social systems in thermodynamic terms (equation shown), where$\tilde{U} \,$is the internal energy, $\tilde{G} \,$the Gibbs potential, $\tilde{T} \,$the temperature, $\tilde{S} \,$the entropy, where the tilde (~) means the quantities are social “analogous quantities” to actual thermodynamic potentials, and where the $\tilde{f}_i \,$denote external factors (influencing the people of the system), which influence some of the social system characteristics$\tilde{x}_i \,$, upon which the internal energy depends; founded the journal Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems (2003); followup articles include: “Social Equivalent of Free Energy” (2004), “Social Free Energy of a Pareto-Like Resource Distribution” (2007), among others. 14. Eann Patterson (c.1955-)English mechanical engineer 2004 In The Entropy Vector: Connecting Business and Science, co-authored with Robert Handscombe, they argue that to learn to manage and control change (social, technical, and business) one must obtain a better grasp of science, in particular energy and entropy; the book seems to be very thermodynamical, with chapters on “natural philosophy and business”, “life the universe and entropy”, “energy and entropy”, “time and entropy”, “managing disorder”, “creativity and innovation”, “risk and entropy”, “mental entropy”, “entropy tradeoffs”, etc.; dominate terms and people used include: Nicholas Georgescu, Leon Brillouin, Stephen Hawking, Rudolf Clausius, Maxwell’s demon, and interestingly free energy; Patterson currently is chair of mechanical engineering at Michigan State University. 15. Stefan Pohl-Valero (c.1977-)Spanish mechanical engineer and social thermodynamicist 2005 Gave a workshop talk (Third Milan Workshop on the Physical Sciences in the Third World) on "The 'Morality' of Thermodynamics: the Controversy of its Laws in a New Public Sphere, Spain 1868-1880"; his 2007 PhD dissertation “The Circulation of Energy: Thermodynamics, National Culture, and Social Progress in Spain, 1868-1890” builds on the work of Crosbie Smith and Greg Myers to discuss how William Thomson, Balfour Stewart, Peter Tait, and Thomas Huxley, etc., applied and used thermodynamics to theorize about humanist implications; recent articles include: “The Communication of Thermodynamics: Physical Culture and Power in Spain in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century” (2009), “Thermodynamics, Social Thought, and Biopolitics in the Spain of the Restoration” (2010), and “Energy, Entropy, and Religion: A Historical Review” (2010), the latter co-written with Favio Vitery. 16. Adrian Bejan (1948-)Romanian-born American mechanical enginee 2006 His articles, e.g. “Constructing Animal Locomotion from New Thermodynamics Theory” (2006), and books, e.g. Constructal Theory of Social Dynamics (2007), have been attempting to outline a constructal theory of social dynamics, where society is seen as a live “flow system” (e.g. a river basin, vascularized tissue, city traffic). 17. Richard Hughes (c.1955-)American mechanical engineer and government and politics theorist 2008 Taught a course on the thermodynamics of government (government thermodynamics) and politics (political thermodynamics), at California State University. 18.

References
1. Licker, Mark D. (2003). Dictionary of Engineering. McGraw-Hill.