ABSTRACT
We remind ourselves we are trying to present the essential aspects of physical chemistry and we consider this one of the most essential topics. In our treatment of the van der Waals gas, we have already mentioned the ideas of the collisions of small atoms, which have a lot of space between them as in Dalton’s law. Here, we go into further detail regarding the behavior of gas molecules using the ideas of Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906), who was one of the intellectual giants of the late nineteenth century and whose ‘‘Boltzmann principle’’ of energy distribution is one of the pillars of modern science. The breakthrough here was due mainly to Boltzmann’s PhD thesis on the theory of gases. Here, we will first review the freshman chemistry derivation of part of kinetic molecular theory of gases (KMTG) and then introduce Boltzmann’s amazing energy principle.
