![]() ![]() 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. 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!Ī 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. 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). 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. Understanding these connections allows us to predict how and when chemical changes will occur, which is the heart of chemistry. Now we are ready to draw all these ideas together and make connections between the macroscopic and molecular levels. If you know the temperature at which phase changes occur in a material (solid to liquid, liquid to gas, etc.), you can make predictions about how much energy is required to overcome the interactions between the particles that make up the material. ![]()
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