Temperature of work done on the work reservoir, and the first law of thermodynamics. The amounts of energy transferred as heat respectively from reservoir 1 and from reservoir 2 may then be denoted respectively and . Then the absolute or thermodynamic temperatures, and , of the reservoirs are defined so that to be such that Kelvin's original work postulating absolute temperature was published in 1848. It was based on the work of Carnot, before the formulation of the first law of thermodynamics. Kelvin wrote in his 1848 paper that his scale was absolute in the sense that it was defined "independently
Absolute zero Δ"H" are nearly the same over a considerable range of temperatures and justifies the approximate empirical Principle of Thomsen and Berthelot, which states that "the equilibrium state to which a system proceeds is the one that evolves the greatest amount of heat", i.e., an actual process is the "most exothermic one". (Callen, pp. 186–187) One model that estimates the properties of an electron gas at absolute zero in metals is the Fermi gas. The electrons, being Fermions, must be in different quantum states, which leads the electrons to get very high typical velocities, even at absolute zero. The maximum energy