PERSON
Sadi Carnot
The French engineer (1796–1832) who, in a single 118-page book, founded the science of thermodynamics by asking not how to build a better engine but what the absolute best engine could ever be—the first person in history to reason rigorously about physical limits, and therefore the right guide to the limits that intelligence built from matter cannot exceed.
Sadi Carnot asked the question that the discourse about artificial intelligence most needs and least asks: not what this engine can do, but what the best possible engine of this kind could ever do, and why no improvement could exceed it. Working in 1824 from a theory of heat that was entirely false—caloric, the imaginary weightless fluid—he derived one of the permanent laws of physics: the maximum efficiency of any heat engine is fixed by the temperatures it operates between, and by nothing else. Not the fuel, not the materials, not the ingenuity of the engineer. This is the founding act of what we now call the second law of thermodynamics, and it established, for the first time, reasoning from impossibility as a discipline: assume a process can exceed a limit, show it would produce perpetual motion, conclude
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