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I read in this weeks Time (or maybe it was Newsweek) a statement that I have heard numerous times over the years and dismissed as nonsense but it occurred to me now that it has been 45 years since I took college physics and maybe I'm remembering something incorrectly, although I don't think so.
The statements that I have heard go like this: you increase the temperature of something and that causes the collisions among the molecules to speed up.
Now it has always been my belief, and this is what I would like confirmation of, that it exactly the opposite. You do something that causes the collisions to speed up and that thing that we call "temperature" therefore measures a larger amount because fundamentally what it is measuring is the speed of the collisions.
Do I have that right?
The statements that I have heard go like this: you increase the temperature of something and that causes the collisions among the molecules to speed up.
Now it has always been my belief, and this is what I would like confirmation of, that it exactly the opposite. You do something that causes the collisions to speed up and that thing that we call "temperature" therefore measures a larger amount because fundamentally what it is measuring is the speed of the collisions.
Do I have that right?