4 – Advanced Concepts in Emergy

: Emergy assessment is a concept in progress. As the history of science shows, a great many concepts are controversial at the outset. This is shown more specifically by the history of thermodynamics; until the middle of the 19th Century, the idea that heat was a fluid that flowed to an equilibrium point, like water, was commonly accepted. The formulation of the first law, and the work of Nicolas Carnot, was highly disputed. Even today, the baseline calculation for exergy remains a subject for debate in research journals.