A new perspective on classical ideal gases

Abstract

The ideal-gas barometric and pressure laws are derived from the Democritian concept of independent corpuscles moving in vacuum, plus a principle of simplicity, namely that these laws are independent of the kinetic part of the Hamiltonian. A single corpuscle in contact with a heat bath in a cylinder and submitted to a constant force (weight) is considered. The paper importantly supplements a previously published paper: First, the stability of ideal gases is established. Second, we show that when walls separate the cylinder into parts and are later removed, the entropy is unaffected. We obtain full agreement with Landsberg's and others' (1994) classical thermodynamic result for the entropy of a column of gas submitted to gravity. © 2013 by the authors.