Dennis Whyte

And so in a gas, you can think of this as being this room and the things, although you can't see them, is that the molecules are—

flying around, but then with some frequency, they basically bounce into each other.

And when they bounce into each other, they exchange momentum and energy around on this.

And so, it turns out that the probability and the distances and the scattering of those of what they do, it's those interactions that set the, about how a gas behaves.

So, what do you mean by this?

So, for example, if I take an imaginary test particle of some kind, like I spray something into the air that's got a particular color, in fact, you can do it in liquids as well too, like how it gradually will disperse away from you, this is fundamentally set because of the way that those particles are bouncing into each other.

The probabilities of those particles.

Yeah, the rate that they go at and the distance that they go at and so forth.

So this was figured out by Einstein and others at the beginning of the Brownian motion, all these kinds of things.

These were set up at the beginning of the last century and it was really like this great revelation.

Wow, this is why matter behaves the way that it does.

Like, wow.

So, but it's really like, and also in liquids and in solids, like what really matters is how you're interacting with your nearest neighbor.

So, you think about that one, the gas particles are basically going around.

Until they actually hit into each other, though, they don't really exchange information.

And it's the same in a liquid.

You're kind of beside each other, but you can kind of move around.

And in a solid, you're literally like stuck beside your neighbor.

You can't move like you're moving.

Plasmas are weird in the sense that it's not like that.