Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) was a famous physicist who liked to pose what are now known as Fermi problems, in which several assumptions are made in order to make a seemingly impossible estimate. Probably the most famous example is the estimate of the number of piano tuners in Chicago using the approximate population of the city and assumptions about how many households have pianos, how often pianos need tuning, and how many hours a given tuner works in a year. Another famous example of a Fermi problem is "Caesar's last breath," which estimates that you, right now, are breathing some of the molecules exhaled by Julius Caesar just before he died. The assumptions made are: 1. The gas molecules from Caesar's last breath are now evenly dispersed in the atmosphere. 2. The atmosphere is 50 km thick, has an average temperature of 15 °C, and an average pressure of 0.20 atm. 3. The radius of the Earth is about 6400 km. 4. The volume of a single human breath is roughly 500 ml. Perform the calculations, reporting all answers to two significant figures,
Ideal and Real Gases
Ideal gases obey conditions of the general gas laws under all states of pressure and temperature. Ideal gases are also named perfect gases. The attributes of ideal gases are as follows,
Gas Laws
Gas laws describe the ways in which volume, temperature, pressure, and other conditions correlate when matter is in a gaseous state. The very first observations about the physical properties of gases was made by Robert Boyle in 1662. Later discoveries were made by Charles, Gay-Lussac, Avogadro, and others. Eventually, these observations were combined to produce the ideal gas law.
Gaseous State
It is well known that matter exists in different forms in our surroundings. There are five known states of matter, such as solids, gases, liquids, plasma and Bose-Einstein condensate. The last two are known newly in the recent days. Thus, the detailed forms of matter studied are solids, gases and liquids. The best example of a substance that is present in different states is water. It is solid ice, gaseous vapor or steam and liquid water depending on the temperature and pressure conditions. This is due to the difference in the intermolecular forces and distances. The occurrence of three different phases is due to the difference in the two major forces, the force which tends to tightly hold molecules i.e., forces of attraction and the disruptive forces obtained from the thermal energy of molecules.
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