Definition 1.1. The amount of work required to change the state of an otherwise
adiabatically isolated system depends only on the initial and final states, and not on the
means by which the work is performed, or on the intermediate stages through which the
system passes.
Remark 1.1. Transformations between different equilibrium states can be achieved by
applying work or heat to the system. The first law states that both work and heat are forms
of energy, and that the total energy is conserved.
References
This is a derivative work from [1] a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
work
[1] MIT OpenCourseWare, 8.333 Statistical Mechanics I: statistical mechanics of Particles, Fall
2007
