What is temperature?
Ross H. McKenzie (noreply@blogger.com)
Temperature is NOT the average kinetic energy.
When I taught thermodynamics to second year undergraduates one of the preconceived notions that was hard to dislodge from students was that temperature IS a measure of the average kinetic energy of the atoms or molecules in a system.
First, I will give the merits of this view and then explain why it is problematic.
A profound and important insight from Maxwell's kinetic theory of ideal gases was that the average kinetic energy of the...