He could not continue his education because he could not hear in adolescence and devoted himself to scientific studies. And by self-education, he made his name among respected scientists.
(1663-1705) French physicist. He determined the laws of static friction, and with his work on temperature measurement, he set the stage for 19th-century physicists to develop the concept of "absolute zero". He was born on 31 August 1663 in Paris and died on 11 October 1705 in the same city. He could not continue his education because he started to have a severe hearing in adolescence and devoted himself to scientific research. In those years, Amontons was interested in the construction of various measuring instruments. He made a barometer that was more developed than the examples.
Guillaume Amontons (31 August 1663 – 11 October 1705) was a French scientific instrument inventor and physicist. He was one of the pioneers in studying the problem of friction, which is the resistance to motion when bodies make contact. He is also known for his work on thermodynamics, the concept of absolute zero, and early engine design.
He described his experiments and observations on the making of these measuring instruments, published in 1695 in Remarques et Experiences Physiques sur la Construction d'une Nouvelle Clepsydre, sur les Barometers, Thermometres et Hygrometres (“Notes and Experiments on the Making of a New Water Clock, Barometers, Thermometers, and Hygrometers”). ') compiled in his work.
In the same years, he began to study the frictional forces between stationary bodies. In 1699, he was accepted to the French Academy of Sciences, where he presented his studies on this subject. Meanwhile, Amontons, who was particularly interested in temperature measurement, guided the studies of physicists after him on absolute temperature with his two important studies dated between 1702 and 1703.
The subject of friction was first researched by Leonardo da Vinci in the 15th century, but he did not publish the results of this study. By systematically examining the friction between stationary bodies, Amontons (1699) was the first to explain that the coefficient of friction between two touching surfaces depends not on the area of the surfaces, but on their type, and thus established the laws of static friction (1699). The friction of moving bodies would be studied for the first time by Coulomb in the 18th century, only after Newton explained the laws of motion.
The greatest contribution of Amontons to temperature measurement is his research and observations, which was the starting point of the absolute temperature scale that Kelvin would define in the 19th century. Amontons pioneered the definition of temperature as a physical quantity that can not only be measured but measured. Before him, physicists interested in temperature measurement had made civilian and gas thermometers, developing the first thermoscope made by Galilei in the 16th century. In these thermometers, however, the temperature was graded on a relative scale based on the expansion of a particular liquid or gas. Starting from the “Boyle-Mariotte law”, which states that the volume and pressure of gases at constant temperature are inversely proportional, in 1688 he proposed to measure the temperature by the pressure changes of a fixed mass of gas enclosed in a constant volume, and in 1702 he proposed to measure the temperature with a compressed air pressure system based on this principle. made thermometer. He also suggested that at the point where the pressure approaches zero, the heat energy will also be zero; this point is -273,15°C or absolute zero today.