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5.1: Temperature

  • Page ID
    52321
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    Up to now the major types of change we have considered are phase changes (solid to liquid, liquid to gas, etc.) Now we will look at the elements of a phase change in greater detail starting with temperature. If you look up the definition of temperature you will probably find something like “the degree of heat of an object” and think to yourself, “Well, that’s not very illuminating, is it?” However, it is actually quite difficult to give a simple definition of temperature, (typically abbreviated as T). If you were already taught about temperature in physics courses, please bear with us (a chemist and a cell and molecular biologist) as we work our way through it, sometimes it it helpful to think about things you already know in new ways!

    A useful macroscopic way of thinking about temperature is that it tells you in which direction thermal energy (often called heat) will move—energy always moves from a hotter (higher-temperature) object to a cooler (lower-temperature) one. This may seem like an obvious statement about how the physical world works but do you really know why it must be the case? Why doesn’t heat flow from cooler to warmer? Is there some principle that will allow us to to explain why? We will be coming back to these questions later on in this chapter.

    Students often confuse temperature and thermal energy and before we go on we need to have a good grasp of the difference between them. The temperature of an object is independent of the size of the object, at least until we get down to the atomic/molecular level where temperature begins to lose its meaning as a concept.85 The temperature of a drop of boiling water is the same as the temperature of a pan (or an ocean) of boiling water: 100 °C at sea level. At the same time the total amount of thermal energy in a drop of water is much less than that in a large pot of water at the same temperature. A drop of boiling water may sting for a moment if it lands on you, but a pan of boiling water will cause serious damage if it splashes over you. Why? Even though the two are at the same temperature, one has relatively little thermal energy and the other has a lot; the amount of energy is related to the size of the system. In addition, the amount of thermal energy depends on the type, that is, the composition of the material. Different amounts of different substances can have different amounts of thermal energy, even if they are at the same temperature (weird but true).

    References

    85 Instead of talking about the temperature of an isolated atom or molecule, we talk about its kinetic energy.


    5.1: Temperature is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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