By comparison with solids or liquids, gases are often overlooked or ignored in everyday life. How many times, for example, have you taken an “empty” glass and filled it with water so you could have a drink? If questioned, most people would admit that the glass had been filled with a gas—air—before the water flowed in, but everyday speech has not yet evolved to conform with scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, the air which occupies “empty” glasses, surrounds the surface of the earth to a depth of about 50 km, and fills your lungs every time you breathe is extremely important. If we had to, most of us could survive for weeks without solid food and for days without liquid water. But each of us must have a fresh supply of air every few minutes to go on living.
Why do we study gases? Gases impact our lives everyday, even if we are only mildly aware of their impact. The video in this section helps us to better understand why scientists want to better understand gases.
While we know quite a bit about the properties of solids and liquids from our experiences, we often lack knowledge about the properties of gases because of their intangible nature. On this page, you will learn more about the often colorless and clear gases that often go unnoticed in our daily lives.
How do you measure the force that invisible substances exert on their surroundings? In this section we will find out how the invisible forces of gases are quantified and measured.
Gas laws tell us how gases act under different conditions. This pages gives an intro to gas laws and has various demos to bring real life significance to gas laws.
What happens to the volume of a gas as its heated? From experience, you probably know the answer. This article will explore the connection between volume and temperature and in the process come to an interesting conclusion about the lowest temperature possible.
Each gas law describes a portion of gases behavior. The Ideal Gas Law unifies all the other gas laws to more completely describe the behavior of gases.
What happens to the volume of gases when the react? The following pages introduces the Law of Combined Gases which utilizes the ideal gas law to determine how gases behave in reactions.
In the previous page, we looked at what occurs when gases react. But what if the gases are inert (unreactive)? Here we investigate what occurs to pressure when you combine inert gases.
Kinetic theory gives insight into the behavior of gases on a microscopic scale. In this section, we derive an equation that allows us to connect macroscopic features (temperature) with microscopic features (molar kinetic energy).
Why do Avogadro's and Gay Lussac's Laws hold? This article describes how molecular speed explains why two of the gas laws work. After explaining how the gas laws work, molecular speed is related to molecular mass, a connection explored in more depth in further sections.
Not all gases are alike, and due to their differing molecular masses, they move at different rates. The details of the rates of movement as they relate to molar mass are discussed in this section.
Molecular speed varies even within a container of a seemingly uniform gas. This page describes the graph that best displays the variation of molecular speed within a gas.
The ideal gas law is called ideal for a reason... Not all situations are ideal and when that is the case, gases behavior differently than we might predict. This section tells us why and how gases depart from the ideal gas law.
