Speaker
Alejandro Satz
(Harford Community College)
Description
Students introduced to thermodynamics often struggle with the distinctions between temperature, heat, and internal energy, concepts all used more or less interchangeably in everyday life or in pop-science but which have precise and distinct definitions in physics. In this talk I will highlight how physical systems with negative heat capacity, for which spontaneous energy losses correlate to increases in temperature, can be used to make the distinctions more easily understandable at a conceptual level.
Primary author
Alejandro Satz
(Harford Community College)
