Clausius, Rudolf Julius Emanuel

The Pole Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius (1822 - 1888), son to a pastor and school inspector, was a physicist and mathemati-cian.

He laid the base for the theory of heat. He introduced the concept of entropy (a kind of randomness), and formulated the first and second laws of thermodynamics:

1. the energy of the universe is constant
2. the entropy of the universe tends to a maximum

He introduced the virial theorem that relates the average over time of a system of discrete particles with that of the particles at any time.