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Boltzmann was born in Erdberg, a suburb of Vienna into a Catholic family. His father, Ludwig Georg Boltzmann, was a revenue official. His grandfather, who had moved to Vienna from Berlin, was a clock manufacturer, and Boltzmann's mother, Katharina Pauernfeind, was originally from Salzburg.
The Boltzmann constant (k B or k) is the proportionality factor that relates the average relative thermal energy of particles in a gas with the thermodynamic temperature of the gas. [2] It occurs in the definitions of the kelvin (K) and the gas constant , in Planck's law of black-body radiation and Boltzmann's entropy formula , and is used in ...
The Boltzmann equation can be used to determine how physical quantities change, such as heat energy and momentum, when a fluid is in transport. One may also derive other properties characteristic to fluids such as viscosity , thermal conductivity , and electrical conductivity (by treating the charge carriers in a material as a gas). [ 2 ]
Boltzmann's rationale for the presence of discrete energy levels in molecules such as those of iodine gas had its origins in his statistical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics theories and was backed up by mathematical arguments, as would also be the case twenty years later with the first quantum theory put forward by Max Planck.
Ludwig Boltzmann defined entropy as a measure of the number of possible microscopic states (microstates) of a system in thermodynamic equilibrium, consistent with its macroscopic thermodynamic properties, which constitute the macrostate of the system. A useful illustration is the example of a sample of gas contained in a container.
Boltzmann's equation—carved on his gravestone. [1]In statistical mechanics, Boltzmann's equation (also known as the Boltzmann–Planck equation) is a probability equation relating the entropy, also written as , of an ideal gas to the multiplicity (commonly denoted as or ), the number of real microstates corresponding to the gas's macrostate:
The Boltzmann equation for the distribution function of a gas in non-equilibrium states is still the most effective equation for studying transport phenomena in gases and metals. By introducing the concept of thermodynamic probability as the number of microstates corresponding to the current macrostate, he showed that its logarithm is ...
The Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution is a result of the kinetic theory of gases, which provides a simplified explanation of many fundamental gaseous properties, including pressure and diffusion. [3] The Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution applies fundamentally to particle velocities in three dimensions, but turns out to depend only on the speed ...