Hello and welcome to the Science of Everything podcast.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

In this podcast, I discuss a wide variety of topics in both the natural and social sciences,

exploring the many fascinating scientific discoveries that can help us better understand the world in which we live.

This is the sixth episode, and the topic for today is thermodynamics. So in this episode I'm going to look at, start off with temperature and heat and move on to the four laws of thermodynamics.

And then we'll have a look at transferring energy, methods of transferring

energy from one place to another, and we'll finish up with an analysis of entropy.

So, first of all, what is thermodynamics?

Thermodynamics refers to the study of the movement of energy and also the conversion of energy from one form to another,

and also how this affects properties such as temperature, work, pressure, volume, etc.

Now, I'm not going to get into the thorny issue of what is energy in this podcast.

That's really a whole other podcast to itself.

But basically, in physics, energy is the ability to do work.

And energy comes in various forms, such as kinetic energy, which is the energy associated

with motion, gravitational potential energy, the energy associated with being inside a gravitational field,

elastic potential energy, like the energy of a rubber band when you stretch it, etc.

Okay, so first we'll start with temperature and heat.

What is temperature?

Temperature is colloquially a measure of how hot something is,

but in physics it has a more specific definition

relating to the average kinetic energy of all of the molecules and or atoms,

so all the particles, within a particular substance. So that's the average speed with of the molecules and or atoms, so all the particles, within a particular substance.

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