Recent content by knulp

statistical mechanics -- why is temperature not a mechanical variable Hi, I have heard that temperature is not a mechanical variable. That is, that even if you knew the positions and momenta of all the particles in some system, you still couldn't calculate the temperature, because temperature...

Okay. My question was pretty vaguely stated but I meant it to be pretty general, and I think I've become a little more comfortable with the idea. The question was, for the protein folding processes that involve a free energy barrier, how do the proteins get over the energy barrier, if it's...

Sure, but I'm really talking about those (many) proteins that don't seem to require chaperones. Also, I'll just modify what I first wrote -- the nature of the barrier probably varies from protein to protein, but I still think that it's usually an entropy-dominated effect. The conformational...

I have a question about protein folding. I have heard that there is a free energy barrier to overcome in going from the unfolded (ensemble) to folded states, and that this barrier is largely entropic -- i.e., as the (idealized, general) protein starts to fold, it loses more in entropy than it...

Thanks, it makes complete sense now. So simple, doh!

Hi, I have a question about a certain step in the following problem/derivation, which you'll see in square brackets: Show that T * (\partial/ \partialT) = (-1/T) * (\partial/ \partial(1/T)) ["\partial/\partialT" is the operator that takes the partial derivative of something with respect to T]...