Important Notes:

• The way that caching seems to work in Netscape or Internet Explorer (IE) is that when you leave one thermodynamics experiment to go to another, the other one is still "running' in the cache. That means that over time the experiment will run slower on your machine. We therefore strongly recommend that you bookmark this page and then restart either Netscape or IE to do more of the experiments. We realize this is inconvenient but there is little we can do about it. If your machine speed is less than 150 MHZ you will almost certainly have to do this.
• Hitting the reload button while the applet is running will generally cause abberant behavior. Don't hit the reload button.
• As with any JAVA applet, its a good idea to flush your cache periodically.
• We have replaced the multi-colored balls with black dots which makes the applet much less CPU intensive. It should run well on most platforms now under Netscape 3.0 and higher and IE 4.0
• A screen resolution of 800x600 is needed
• Here is a snapshot of the applet.

  
  

  
  

  Read the instructions and then go to the links at the bottom of this page to activate various kinds of experiments that can be done with this applet.

  ---

  Experimental Instructions

  This applet is designed to simulate the diffusion process which occurs when gases of different temperatures are mixed. To activate the mixing click one time on the red vertical bar that separates the two chambers. After a few moments, the bar will turn green and the gases will start to mix and share their energy. The counters in the respective chambers indicate the number of particles in that chamber. The thermometers will start to change temperature as the mixing process is occurring. Eventually both chambers will reach the same temperature.

  In order for this simulation to properly run - its important that the user not be doing other activities on the machine as this will interfere with the timing aspects of the experiment.

  Different initial conditions are setup in a series of experiments and questions related to that experiment can be found underneath the apparatus.

  Do the First Experiment

  Do the Second Experiment

  Do the Third Experiment

  Do the Fourth Experiment

  Do the Fifth Experiment

  Do the Sixth Experiment

  Do the Seventh Experiment

  ---

  Applet coding by Sean Russell
  Graphic images by Amy Hulse
  Content by Greg Bothun