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As the years progressed, Classical Mechanics developed further and further. So in the first half of the nineteenths century it felt like classical mechanics was an all encompassing theory and that physics would become a discipline of working out problems based on a well-established, complete theory. But that wasn't going to be the case at all. Around 1850-1860 several cracks in the theory started to become visible. And they were fundamental!
As the years progressed, Classical Mechanics developed further and further. So in the first half of the nineteenth century it felt like classical mechanics was an all encompassing theory and that physics would become a discipline of working out problems based on a well-established, complete theory. But that wasn't going to be the case at all. Around 1850-1860 several cracks in the theory started to become visible. And they were fundamental!
Already in the 18$^{th}$ century, work was done on what we call the kinetic theory of gases. The Swiss scientist Daniel Bernoulli proposed that gases were a large collection of molecules, i.e tiny particles moving in all directions. According to Bernoulli, their collision with walls was felt macroscopically as pressure and their averaged kinetic energy was in essence the temperature of the gas.
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@@ -48,38 +48,71 @@ If we would do a compression experiment with a fixed number of molecules, $N$, a
The kinetic theory predicts $\gamma$ for various classes of gases. For instance, for monatomic gasses as Helium is $5/3 \approx 1.667$; for diatomic gases, such as Oxygen or Hydrogen, it should be $9/7 \approx 1.286$. And so on. Moreover, $\gamma$ does, according to the kinetic theory, not depend on temperature.
