Week 3: Maxwell Distribution of Molecular Speeds and Energies

At temperatures above absolute zero, all molecules are in motion. In the case of a gas, this motion consists of straight-line jumps whose lengths are quite great compared to the dimensions of the molecule. Although we can never predict the velocity of a particular individual molecule, the fact that we are usually dealing with a huge number of them allows us to know what fraction of the molecules have kinetic energies (and hence velocities) that lie within any given range. The trajectory of an individual gas molecule consists of a series of straight-line paths interrupted by collisions. What happens when two molecules collide depends on their relative kinetic energies; in general, a faster or heavier molecule will impart some of its kinetic energy to a slower or lighter one. Two molecules having identical masses and moving in opposite directions at the same speed will momentarily remain motionless after their collision. If we could measure the instantaneous velocities of all the molecules in a sample of a gas at some fixed temperature, we would obtain a wide range of values. A few would be zero, and a few would be very high velocities, but the majority would fall into a more or less well defined range. We might be tempted to define an average velocity for a collection of molecules, but here we would need to be careful: molecules moving in opposite directions have velocities of opposite signs. Because the molecules are in a gas are in random thermal motion, there will be just about as many molecules moving in one direction as in the opposite direction, so the velocity vectors of opposite signs would all cancel and the average velocity would come out to zero. Since this answer is not very useful, we need to do our averaging in a slightly different way.

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