The Chemical Potential/particle Number Pair
The chemical potential is like a force which pushes an increase in particle number. In cases where there are a mixture of chemicals and phases, this is a useful concept. For example if a container holds water and water vapor, there will be a chemical potential (which is negative) for the liquid pushing water molecules into the vapor (evaporation) and a chemical potential for the vapor, pushing vapor molecules into the liquid (condensation). Only when these "forces" equilibrate is equilibrium obtained.
Read more about this topic: Conjugate Variables (thermodynamics)
Famous quotes containing the words chemical, potential, particle, number and/or pair:
“If Thought is capable of being classed with Electricity, or Will with chemical affinity, as a mode of motion, it seems necessary to fall at once under the second law of thermodynamics as one of the energies which most easily degrades itself, and, if not carefully guarded, returns bodily to the cheaper form called Heat. Of all possible theories, this is likely to prove the most fatal to Professors of History.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”
—Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)
“My tendency to nervousness in my younger days, in view of the fact of a number of near relatives on both my father’s and mother’s side of the house having become insane, gave some serious uneasiness. I made up my mind to overcome it.... In the cross-examination of witnesses before a crowded court-house ... I soon found I could control myself even in the worst of testing cases. Finally, in battle.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“We saw a pair of moose-horns on the shore, and I asked Joe if a moose had shed them; but he said there was a head attached to them, and I knew that they did not shed their heads more than once in their lives.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)