Chapter 9 Temperature and Thermal Equilibrium

In the last couple of chapters we focused on what holds atoms together, and how we can see them. This is especially useful for describing the billions of stars out there that we saw in Chapter 2. Unfortunately, the stuff between the stars is harder to see. While stars consist of lots of atoms packed together, most of outer space is much less dense and filled with the occasional particle like a hydrogen atom, a photon, or dark matter (which we will come back to in Chapter 19). To visualize this mostly-empty space, think of a balloon filled with red smoke that has just been popped inside a room. You can see the red smoke clearly for a little while, but eventually it fills the room; the smoke molecules may be harder to see, but they are still there. Since atoms and photons hanging out in space are much the same as atoms hanging out in a room here on Earth, we can study and understand what they do in both places. That is the focus of this chapter. If I have a bunch of atoms in a room, they will travel around the room and interact with each other. If I have different types of atoms in a room, and if they can mix (like the red smoke mixing with the air), then they eventually will. If the atoms start with different temperatures on different sides of the room, eventually they will mix and the room will have the same temperature everywhere (if someone has not left the window open!). We call this situation, after all the mixing is done, thermal equilibrium. As we will see, this is not just true for atoms in a room; any type of particle can come into thermal equilibrium. Crucially, for us as detectives, if a set of particles is in thermal equilibrium, then we can use that information to predict how things in the room will change over time. This is a key concept we will use to help explain how the universe changes over time. As one of the most useful ways to describe a bunch of atoms or

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molecules hanging out (like in the air in the room you are in) is their temperature, we will start there.

9.1 What is temperature? TV weather reporters talk about the temperature. Americans tend to describe the temperature in Fahrenheit. People everywhere else use Celsius, except scientists who use Kelvin. You can think of room temperature as being about 70 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about 30 degrees Celsius. Since Kelvin is the same as Celsius but larger by 273, room temperature is about 300 degrees Kelvin. But what do we really mean by temperature? Typically we think of it in terms of feeling hot or feeling cold. When we feel cold, the thermometer displays a small number. When the sun is shining outside, we feel hot and the thermometer displays a large number. It feels cooler at night. Why does it feel hot? What does a thermometer measure? To answer these questions, think about what happens during the day time. Photons hit your skin and are absorbed by your body. Since each photon hitting your skin has energy it can deposits its energy into the atoms in your body; this makes you heat up and you feel hot. Taking the idea further, assuming your body absorbs all the light that hits you, an ultraviolet photon has more energy to deposit than an infrared one. Thus, when ultraviolet light hits you feel hotter. For temperature, what matters is the energy of the things hitting you (see Figure 9.1); the more energetic the photons (i.e., shorter wavelengths), the higher the temperature. Note that your skin is not a good thermometer, you feel hotter in direct sunlight than in the shade because more photons are hitting you; you are getting mislead, the temperature is typically no lower in shade than in the direct sunlight.

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<FIGURE 9.1 ABOUT HERE>

We can talk about the temperature of a bunch of photons or a bunch of atoms. Since atoms also have energy and can hit you, a bunch of atoms has a temperature. For example, even if we were in a room with zero photons (i.e., perfectly dark), we can still feel warm. This is because atoms are hitting us, depositing energy in our skin which heats us and makes us feel warm. The more energetic the atoms, the higher the temperature. We can thus compare two rooms. If we have two rooms with different speed atoms we can say which has a higher temperature. We can also talk about the temperature of a star. If a star has a high temperature, that means that the atoms in it are very energetic and the photons coming from it will mostly be the same energy. The temperature of the surface of the Sun is about 5,800 K and we mostly see yellow light coming from it.

9.2 Thermal equilibrium A room full of atoms can have different temperatures on different sides of the room. For example, if you are in a hot room and someone turns on the air conditioner for twenty minutes, then some of the atoms in the room now have lower energy than the others. Assuming there are no windows letting in light or outside air, eventually everything evens out and the whole room comes to a (hopefully) reasonable temperature. If there is a fan in the room, the cool air mixes more quickly with the hot air. What is happening at the atomic level? Here, individual atoms in the room bang into each other like billiard balls. Consider a pool table where a moving cue ball strikes a stationary pool

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ball. After the collision the stationary one begins to move and the cue ball moves off at a slower speed. This is also true even if the second ball is not stationary, but is moving at some speed. In general, a high speed ball that bangs into a slower moving ball will become slower, but the slower moving ball picks up speed from the collision. The same is true for atoms. When a highenergy atom strikes a low-energy atom (Figure 9.2), it transfers some of its energy to the lowenergy atom, making the lower-energy atom speed up to become a medium-energy atom. The opposite is also true: the higher-energy atom gives up some of its energy and therefore slows down, also becoming a medium-energy atom. After the collision, both atoms move with speeds that are, on average, closer to being the same.

<FIGURE 9.2 ABOUT HERE>

How does this explain the room coming to be the same temperature everywhere? Consider an extreme example. At the beginning of a game of pool, right after we shoot the cue ball at the full rack of balls (see Figure 9.3), the cue ball (our high-energy atom) starts with high energy, while the others start with low (or zero) energy. After they collide, the cue ball has a lower energy than before, while the regular balls now have some energy of motion. In the collision the energy was transferred from one ball to the others. Now all the balls on the pool table move around and collide. If we had a perfect pool table (one without friction) then the balls will move around the table forever, and as the balls bounce off each other, the higher-energy ones will bounce into the lower-energy ones and all will become medium-energy ones.

<FIGURE 9.3 ABOUT HERE>

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Eventually all the balls will have roughly the same energy1. In other words, the temperature is the same everywhere. This situation is called thermal equilibrium. By way of contrast, let us look at a similar scenario that is not in thermal equilibrium. The bottom set of rows in Figure 9.3 shows the same pool table and pool balls, but now we have a bad shot: The cue ball will never hit the rack. The cue will always stay high-energy and the other balls will never get any energy, so this system is far from equilibrium. If I am sitting in a room in thermal equilibrium, then there should be an equal number of atoms coming at me from all directions and all roughly with the same energy. An analogy is a diver in the middle of a school of fish (see Figure 9.4). From her perspective, since they are swimming with roughly the same speed in all directions, the temperature is the same in every direction. What if the diver is swimming to the right? Then there would be an equal number of fish in all directions, but the speed of the fish would be different in different directions; they would be moving toward the diver faster in the direction she is swimming, and slower in the opposite direction. Thus, the fish temperature would be different in different directions, even though the fish are in thermal equilibrium.

<FIGURE 9.4 ABOUT HERE>

The bottom line is that you can tell that you are located in a room that is in thermal equilibrium if the temperature is the same in all directions, or if the temperature looks as if you

For those who are interested, we note that just like the balls on a pool table, some of the balls move faster than average and some move slower than average. We are able to predict both the average speed, as well as how many (on average) have each speed. This is known as the Boltzmann distribution and it can be used to measure the temperature of the balls on the table.

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(or the room!) are moving in a single direction. For most groupings of photons or atoms (unless they are stuck in place, like when they are in a solid, such as a rock), it is only a matter of time until they come into thermal equilibrium (assuming something else is quickly). Similarly, if atoms or photons are in thermal equilibrium they remain so, unless something makes them change.

9.3 Other types of thermal equilibrium We have talked about atoms interacting and coming into thermal equilibrium, but we can have many different types of particles interacting in different ways and coming into thermal equilibrium. For example, you are in a room whose air contains both oxygen atoms and nitrogen atoms. The atoms (long ago) mixed and came to have roughly the same temperature everywhere. In Figure 9.5 we see a simplified, but extreme example. At the start, the high-mass and low-mass atoms are separate and have different temperatures. Before they start mixing, each is in thermal equilibrium separately, but they are not in thermal equilibrium with each other. Since there are different temperatures on each side, you can tell the whole thing is not in thermal equilibrium. When the atoms start to mix, the atoms interact and end up with the same temperature in all directions; eventually the room reaches thermal equilibrium.

<FIGURE 9.5 ABOUT HERE>

Atoms are not the only things that can be in thermal equilibrium. Any group of particles can interact with each other and come into thermal equilibrium. In previous examples, we talked about atoms hitting each other like billiard balls. These types of interactions change the high-

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energy and low-energy atoms into medium-energy atoms. However, there are other types of collisions. In Chapter 7, we looked at some special ways in which electrons and photons interact. But there are other ways as well (see Figure 9.6). For example, two very-high-energy photons can collide and turn into an electron and an anti-electron (a.k.a. a positron). Note that this does not typically happen in the room you are sitting in because the typical photons you see with your eyes have an energy that are ten thousand times too small for it to occur. Also note that the amount of charge before the collision is zero (both photons are neutral) and there is no net charge after the collision (the sum of the positive charge and the negative charge is neutral). A second example collision, allowed by quantum mechanics, is that an electron and an anti-electron can collide and turn into a pair of photons2. Just as high-energy and low-energy atoms can interact to produce medium-energy atoms, so electrons and positrons can interact to create high-energy photons and vice-versa.

<FIGURE 9.6 ABOUT HERE>

Since high-energy photons can create electrons and positrons, and electrons and positrons can create photons, they can all mix and come into thermal equilibrium. It is not just that the energy of all the particles will eventually be similar, but that the number of each type of particle will come into equilibrium. Suppose we start with a room full of only electrons and positrons. Eventually, there would be a collision that produces a pair of photons. There are still many electrons and positrons, so they will continue to have collisions and produce more photons. Oddly enough, we will never run out of electrons and photons: at some point there are enough
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This type of interaction is probably where science fiction TV shows get their ideas for anti-matter guns. If I shoot anti-matter, for example an anti-electron, at a target and it hits an electron in an atom then the electron/anti-electron pair could turn into a big burst of light (two photons).

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photons to collide with each other to start producing electrons and positrons again (see Figure 9.7). Eventually, the number of electrons, positrons, and photons (as well as all the energies) will stabilize. Similarly, if we start with lots of very-high-energy photons then it is just a matter of time before electrons and positrons will be produced and the whole room comes into equilibrium.

<FIGURE 9.7 ABOUT HERE>

In fact, scientists can do a good job of predicting the average number of each particle in this type of thermal equilibrium. They can also predict the average energy of the particles and how much time it will take before the room reaches equilibrium. It is possible for any configuration with many particles to eventually come into thermal equilibrium and it is straightforward to determine what thermal equilibrium should look like. The bottom line is that, given enough time, objects come into thermal equilibrium no matter how many different types of particles there are.

9.4 What we can, and cannot, learn from systems in thermal equilibrium There is good news and bad news about bunches of particles that come into thermal equilibrium. The good news is that when you close the doors to your room and turn on the air conditioner, no matter what temperature the atoms start with, it is just a matter of time before you get a cool room. The bad news is that if many different initial temperature conditions all lead to the same thermal equilibrium temperature, we cannot, as detectives, tell how things started. In other words, we cannot learn for sure what happened before the room came into equilibrium.

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Said differently, if we walk into a room that is in thermal equilibrium, we have no way of telling whether the room started out cool or if it was hot on one side and cool on the other unless there is some other evidence. Another example is a pool table with the balls in equilibrium. We cannot tell if a single cue ball hit the full rack of balls, or whether the rest of the balls started in some other configuration (see Figure 9.8). If all we can see is how things are at a later time (picture e), we cannot tell how things started (picture a).

<FIGURE 9.8 ABOUT HERE>

In the next few chapters, we will see that the universe acts like a giant room of various particle and atom types that at some point reached thermal equilibrium. This tells us a lot about the universe and how it changed over time because we understand how things in thermal equilibrium change over time. The problem, however, is that once the universe came into thermal equilibrium we lost some of our ability to learn about what happened before it became that way. Much like the pool ball example, we cannot say anything with confidence yet about the beginning of the universe, what we are calling the big bang. While we would like to know what happened at the beginning, or before the beginning (or if there was a before the beginning), all we can describe confidently is what happened after the big bang and after it came into thermal equilibrium. Now that we have finished going over the physics that we will need (Unit 2), we will now use the physics we learned to understand the evidence for the big bang (Unit 3).

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Figure 9.1: Two different rooms with atoms that illustrate the difference between high and low temperatures. Each has only one type of atom (helium, for example) and the length of each arrow (only on a few of the atoms) indicates how fast that atom is moving, and thus its energy. In the room on the left each atom has a large speed, which means it has a high energy. A person inside this room would feel this as having a higher temperature than a person in the room on the right because its atoms have a higher speed (larger energy); this would be experienced as a higher temperature.

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Figure 9.2: A series of action shots showing the collision between a high-energy atom and a low-energy atom. The high-energy atom (on the left) has a high speed and is moving towards the low-energy, and thus low-speed, atom (on the right). After the collision, the atom on the left has a lower energy (and speed) than it used to, and the atom on the right has a higher energy (and speed) than it used to. Overall, the speeds are now closer to being the same.

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Figure 9.3: A set of action shots showing balls moving on a perfect pool table where friction does not slow down the balls. In the top two rows we start in a scenario where the balls are not in thermal equilibrium. Starting in b, the cue ball has been shot, moves towards the rack. In c the cue ball has hit the regular balls and they begin to bounce around. Eventually, by the last figure, they all end up moving at roughly the same speed and in random directions; we say that the balls are effectively in thermal equilibrium. The three rows in the bottom part of the figure show a very different type scenario. In this case the cue ball never hits the rack and the balls on the table never reach thermal equilibrium. a) b) c)

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Figure 9.4: A diver in a school of fish. The fish can be thought of as being in thermal equilibrium if they are all moving in random directions and all roughly have the same speed. The speed of the fish from the divers perspective is different in the two scenarios but she can still tell that the fish are in thermal equilibrium.

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Figure 9.5: A set of action shots showing two sets of atoms mixing. While there are the same number of atoms on both side, at the start, the atoms on the left have, on average, five times more energy than the atoms on the right. After the barriers between the two are removed, the atoms bounce off each other. Ultimately, the atoms mix and the energies of the atoms change until the energy of the various are all roughly the same. At that time, the system has the same temperature everywhere and has come into thermal equilibrium.

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Figure 9.6: A sequence of action shots where two high-energy photons hit each other and turn into an electron and a positron (an anti-electron). In the bottom sequence we see the inverse, where an electron and a positron hit each other and turn into a pair of photons. Note that these types of interactions only occur when the energies are very high, like in the time right after the big bang, or in particle accelerators. a) b) c)

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Figure 9.7: A series of action shots showing photons, electrons, and positrons in thermal equilibrium with a very high temperature. Starting in the top left figure, two electrons and two positrons approach each other. Eventually both pairs collide and create a pair of photons. One of these pairs of photons then collides and creates another electron and positron pair.

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Figure 9.8: Two sets of action shots showing scenarios that have both come into thermal equilibrium. In the top sequence, the balls start on the table in the usual way before coming into thermal equilibrium. In the bottom sequence, they start in an unusual way. Either way, both scenarios come into thermal equilibrium. It is disappointing that if we just saw the fifth picture in the sequence, it is virtually impossible to tell how things started. If you take into account the uncertainty from quantum mechanics it is completely impossible to determine how it started. a) b) c) d) e)