What is an Ideal Gas?

In some upcoming videos, I want to talk about practical applications of entropy. I have decided to focus on an ideal gas, a gas where each particle acts independently of all other particles. Focusing on such a gas can make our lives much easier since we can figure out a pattern for one particle, then apply it to all the particles. So, what does it mean for each particle to be independent of all other particles? In practice, it means two things: 1. Particles take up zero space. The more space each particle takes up, the less space particles have to move. In the extreme case, the particles take up so much space that you no longer have a gas, but a liquid or a solid under extremely high pressure. 2. Particles do not interact. With real gases, particles tend to want to stick together as a net result of the intermolecular forces, which include hydrogen bonds and van der Waals forces. In the extreme case, you again end up with liquids or solids. While both of these requirements may seem too restrictive to apply to any real gases, the ideal gas model approximates many gases quite well over a wide range of temperatures, pressures, and volumes, and will serve as a starting point to talk about thermodynamics. #VeritasiumContest #veritasiumcontest Contact me: [email protected] ------------------------- The gas I've depicted is not an ideal gas because all the particles have some volume, but it's close to ideal because the size of the particles is so small and the collisions are elastic. Furthermore, there's also some temperature dependence since everything turns into a gas at a high enough temperature. At high temperatures, the particles have too much energy to stick together. ------------------------- You can find the code here: https://github.com/TheLandfill/ideal-gas-video I wrote a basic physics engine that works with spheres and boundaries in any number of dimensions (I didn't know if I was going to do a 2D or a 3D simulation, so I did both.), which you can find within the code somewhere. It uses sweep and prune to handle broad collision detection and just checks if the spheres are closer than the sum of their radii. I also used Manim CE v0.9.0: https://docs.manim.community/en/stable/ I used the PixelGameEngine from OneLoneCoder (a.k.a. javidx9 on Youtube): https://github.com/OneLoneCoder/olcPixelGameEngine ------------------------- "Dreamer" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/