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Lumifer comments on Entropy and Temperature - Less Wrong Discussion

26 Post author: spxtr 17 December 2014 08:04AM

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Comment author: Lumifer 17 December 2014 09:34:54PM 0 points [-]

but we don't think of a tennis ball falling in a vacuum as gaining thermal energy or rising in temperature.

That's because temperature is a characteristic of a multi-particle system. One single particle has energy, a large set of many particles has temperature.

And still speaking of high-school physics, conversion between thermal and kinetic energy is trivially easy and happens all the time around us.

Comment author: jbay 24 December 2014 02:30:49AM 0 points [-]

A tennis ball is a multi-particle system; however, all of the particles are accelerating more or less in unison while the ball free-falls. Nonetheless, it isn't usually considered to be increasing in temperature, because the entropy isn't increasing much as it falls.