1840, Meyer was 26 years old. He arrived in Java as a "ship doctor" with a Dutch ship bound for East India.
When treating the crew, he found that the venous blood in people's blood vessels in tropical areas such as the equator is brighter than that in Europe.
Meyer is a man with a physical and chemical foundation. He suggested that blood turns red and bright because it is rich in oxygen. He also studies animal fever.
In this process, from food to exercise, Meyer came up with the idea that human organisms can do it in a high tropical environment only by absorbing less calories in food. The energy of human body heat and muscle mechanical work comes from food, that is, chemical energy.
He further realized that since the heat of physical body comes from chemical energy, if the energy of animal body is input. If the output is balanced, all these forms of energy must be conserved.
/kloc-before the first half of the 0/9th century, experts in the history of science thought: "People have a hunch that there is a kind of' force', which appears in different forms such as mechanical movement, chemical affinity, electricity, light, heat and magnetism. According to various situations, any one of them can be transformed into another. "
From chemical energy of Volta battery to physical energy, from Nicholson battery in Britain to electrolyze water to convert physical energy into chemical energy, from electric energy revealed by Oster and Ampere to mechanical energy, Faraday also revealed the reverse transformation of mechanical energy into electric energy. This series of theories and experiments make the conditions for studying mutual transformation mature.
Since the forties of 19, there has been an upsurge in the discovery of the great law of 19 all over the world. More than a dozen scholars with different identities and nationalities put forward the principle of generalized energy almost at the same time, and their working methods and perspectives have proved the scientific universality of this principle.
Among them, Meyer is undoubtedly the first.
1842, Meyer wrote On the Force of Inorganic Nature, pointing out that force (energy) is as "cause" as matter, and the primary nature of all causes is "immortality". He said, "Force is an indestructible and convertible weightless object".
This demonstrates the immortality of "force (energy)" from the immortality of cause and effect.
This article has a strong German traditional color, which is too speculative and really amazing. After many twists and turns, the paper was published in the journal Chemistry and Pharmacy. But people don't understand and don't pay attention.
After that, Meyer continued to contribute and expounded the conservation and transformation of energy. However, due to the color and foundation of this pure philosophy, the physics community has not recognized it. Even when Meyer calculated the equivalent value of thermal work, the physics community still sneered at it.
Finally, Meyer's inference became more and more strict and accurate, and the scope became wider and wider, until chemistry, astronomy and life sciences covered all phenomena in the universe today.
Joule was the first person who made an important contribution to the experimental proof of the law of conservation of energy. However, this is also recognized by the history of science. Before Joule's death, he was not recognized by epoch-making works.