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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
There are however innumerable other local motions which on account of the minuteness of the moving particles cannot be detected, such as the motions of the particles in hot bodies, in fermenting bodies, in putrescent bodies, in growing bodies, in the organs of sensation and so forth. If any one shall have the good fortune to discover all these, I might almost say that he will have laid bare the whole nature of bodies so far as the mechanical causes of things are concerned.
Isaac Newton, in Unpublished Papers of Isaac NewtonTEMPERATURE AND PRESSURE
Everybody talks about the weather, and that usually means the temperature, an inescapable part of our environment. Yet Newton's laws of mechanics tell us nothing about temperature. Is there any connection between mechanics and temperature?
In Chapter 10 we saw a connection. If you drop a block from above a table, its potential energy first turns into kinetic energy, and then is transformed into thermal energy when the block hits the table. After a while the only evidence that those events occurred is a slight warming of the surroundings, that is, a small increase in temperature.
What really happens is that the kinetic energy of the falling block is turned into the energy of motion of atoms and molecules. The energy is still there, but the motions are in random directions, not the organized motion of a whole block of matter.
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