Links

I’m aggregating here some useful links for the Thermo courses. You might also want to check out the posts tagged with “Thermo” and “Links”.

1. The entropy function

   Aatish Bhatia’s great article: What the Dalai Lama can teach us about temperatures below absolute zero.

2. Temperature

   Veritassium folks have two videos: Misconceptions about temperature, and Can humans really feel temperature?.

3. Phase transformations

   Freezing of supercooled water: Here’s a demo.

   Water expands on freezing by about 9% by volume (which translates, rougly, to about 3% along each dimension); this is really huge. How huge? Here’s a demo.

   You can freeze water by boiling a solution of water and acetone. Confused? Here’s a demo. By the way, you can also freeze water by boiling it at low pressure, but I am not able to find a video which does this.

   Tin pest is a fantastic phenomenon, and it looks spooky in this time-lapse video.

   Precipitation: Top 7 crystal growth experiments

   This video has all kinds of things about tin: tin pest, tin whiskers, crystallization from a solution through electrolysis. Very informative, and visually stunning.

4. Phase Diagrams

   The system [Wikimedia Commons].

   The Ni-Al system [Wikimedia Commons].

   The Ag-Pt system. [from this page by Prof. W.H. Warnes at Oregon State University.]

   At the San Jose State University, Prof. Guna Selvaduray has made available quite a few phase diagrams.