(... continues from Part I)
Other unexpected puzzles arose, about the nature of heat,
as fire was vital, to factories and fleets.
To the economically minded investors ‘twas also crucial,
that all their voyages, ran unwasteful.
Around the engineers and shipbuilders went questions,
did engine-design have limitations?
Carnot claimed fuel's nature in engines, did not matter,
only did, a fire's temperature.
Unequivocally he proved, it was quite very essential,
that it only be measured, by a gas ideal.
Rumford, Joule, et al too, had claimed temperature,
was simply just, another energy measure.
Only later in the journey, was there clearer recognition,
that heat was merely, pure atomic motion.
Efforts were futile also, for harnessing in its entirety,
the sum total, of a heat-engine’s energy.
A resolution to this strange riddle, would arrive in a little,
from insights of things, quite electrical.
Electricity, together with his twin sister, magnetism,
form the backbones, of Maxwell’s formalisms.
They mathematically encapsulated postulates known ere,
of Gauss, Lorentz, Faraday and Ampere.
Finally light’s physical nature, in vacuum or dielectric,
revealed to exist, as a wave electromagnetic.
With light’s inner secrets, seeming obvious and accepted,
its relation to heat, next, was contested.
Humankind forever knew, light and heat as strange friends,
their nature had to be, by physics now explained.
Confident calculations, of glowing hot bodies dystrophied,
directly, into an ultraviolet catastrophe!
These quandaries vexed minds of Planck, Ludwig, and James,
by strife or doubt, by tragedy, or blame?
The conundrum thence was named, as the Black-Body problem,
illuminating humanity's road, into the era of quantum.
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