TEMPERATURE is a macroscopic value in other words if I look to the left I’ve got some water with a

thermometer in it and we could say the temperature is around 20 degrees Celsius as I add some warm
water to it what’s happening to the temperature it’s increasing, it’s a higher value and now it’s around 35
degrees Celsius but that’s macroscopic it’s what we’re measuring. In the world that we live in but
hopefully you know the temperature is caused by microscopic interactions so we have all these molecules
that are bouncing around and so some have slow velocities some have fast velocities but the average
kinetic energy of all those molecules is equal to the temperature. The more they’re moving the more their
velocities are, the greater the temperature is. And so wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had an equation that
allowed us to move from the microscopic to the macroscopic world, well temperature has to be on the
left kinetic energy has to be on the right this bar on the top means that it’s the average

so we could put in our formula for kinetic energy ½ MV squared now this velocity is the average velocity
of the molecules we call that the root mean square

and then on the left side we have to put in constant so that’s the Boltzmann’s constant so three
halves Boltzmann’s constant times temperature this has to be measured in Kelvin is equal to ½ MV
squared and so this allows us to move from the microscopic world to the macroscopic world.

because temperature is the average kinetic energy of all of the molecules and lots of times you’ll represent
that using a distribution where we put the speed on the bottom and then the number of molecules on
the left so we get a nice distribution that looks like that so far to say where is that average velocity the
tendency is to want to put the average right here but it’s actually going to be since it goes to the right it’s
going to be a little bit off center like that so here’s our formula again what is this this is going to be the
root mean square which is going to be the average velocity of all of those molecules and So what we can
do is if we know that value know the temperature and Boltzmann constant we can figure out the kinetic
energy of even one molecule.

and so temperature remember is going to be molecules bouncing around on the left I’ve got some cold
water on the right I’ve got some warm or hot water I put some dye in it so you can see the molecules
interacting with and I’ve done some time-lapse here so you can see it moving around so you can see on
the right side there’s more molecular motion more of those molecules are moving around so we get
greater distribution of the die and so we use a thermometer to measure how fast those molecules are
going so with the Celsius scale zero is going to be freezing but what happens if we slow those molecules
to a stop that’s going to be absolute zero and we use the Kelvin scale to do that and so remember if you’re
ever converting a temperature to Kelvin which you’ll have to do with any of these problems all you do is
simply add 273 to it so that be 288 Kelvin on the left 338 Calvin on the right.
see how powerful that equation is allows us to go from just a temperature to this microscopic value the
amount of kinetic energy of a single gas molecule so if we look at the Maxwell Boltzmann distribution
we’re going to have a bunch of gas moving around they’re each going to have different velocities some
high some low so we get a distribution that looks like that the largest value most probable velocity but to
the right side of that we’re going to have what’s called the root mean square velocity that’s going to be
the average velocity of all the molecules that are moving around

so here’s the root mean square so how do we calculate that well here’s that formula again if I want to
solve for the velocity so if I want to solve for just this value right here my root mean square is equal to the
root of three KT divided by m, m is going to be the mass of the molecule itself.

and so this could be a quantitative problem that you would solve find the root mean square of a nitrogen
molecule at zero degrees Celsius so how would you solve this problem well we know
the Boltzmann distribution we know the Boltzmann constant we know the temperature since it’s at zero
degrees Celsius we then have to find the mass of a nitrogen molecule so you’d have to use a little bit of
chemistry and so we could use the periodic table to figure out the mass of a nitrogen molecule is equal to
4.65 * 10 to the negative 26 we plug all those values in here and then we’d find the root mean square of
nitrogen but in AP physics they don’t want you to solve it quantitatively they want you to be able to read
a distribution like this so let me pose the same question what’s the root mean square of a nitrogen
molecule at zero degrees Celsius so reading this graph I’d see that nitrogen is going to be the red you can
see that nice distribution like this we’re reading velocities on the bottom and so if I were to approximate
after the right here I would say it’s going to be around a little over 500 meters per second and so you can
read the distribution to figure it out and so did you learn to qualitatively connect the microscopic to the
macroscopic world I hope so and I hope that was helpful.