I have just been thinking about this a little more and it turns out that volume does make a difference to the number of available microstates as multiatom collisions become less likely in a less dense substance wherein the momentum of two atoms in vector x might add up to produce a high value...
Sorry for the basic confusion there. I has always imagined microstates visually - making the volume and locations of the particles an aspect of the calculations, whereas it is actually just about the distribution of energies according to one source I have just read and not about the volume. And...
Sorry still confused. Let's say we have 100 molecules of gas in each of the differently sized boxes both with the same average molecular velocity I would have thought this would give the same temperature reading as interactions with a thermometer would be the same, though less frequent in the...
Assume that you can apply the breaks to just before a skidding state and can also turn the car in such a way to maintain the wheels in a just before skidding state, then look at the force vectors working on the car and deduce the one which on average is bigger away from the wall throughout each...
I am quite confused about this area.
First entropy does not contain any reference to volume. So if we can theoretically set the entropy of A and B gas samples as the same but in different volumes. If A is in a larger volume it would be able to exhibit a larger number of microstates? Yet the...
There is an interesting article here
http://focus.aps.org/story/v18/st4
about a method for tunnelling light through usually opaque materials. Half way through they mention that one light ray becomes two:
"When a light ray passing from glass into air strikes the interface at a...