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The molar heat capacity is the heat capacity per unit amount (SI unit: mole) of a pure substance, and the specific heat capacity, often called simply specific heat, is the heat capacity per unit mass of a material. Heat capacity is a physical property of a substance, which means that it depends on the state and properties of the substance under ...
[1] [2] [3] A more fundamental statement was later labelled as the zeroth law after the first three laws had been established. The zeroth law of thermodynamics defines thermal equilibrium and forms a basis for the definition of temperature: if two systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third system, then they are in thermal equilibrium ...
Informally, however, a difference in the energy of a system that occurs solely because of a difference in its temperature is commonly called heat, and the energy that flows across a boundary as a result of a temperature difference is "heat". Altitude (or elevation) is usually not a thermodynamic property.
(The heat change at constant pressure is called the enthalpy change; in this case the widely tabulated enthalpies of formation are used.) A related term is the heat of combustion, which is the chemical energy released due to a combustion reaction and of interest in the study of fuels.
The SI unit for heat capacity of an object is joule per kelvin (J/K or J⋅K −1). Since an increment of temperature of one degree Celsius is the same as an increment of one kelvin, that is the same unit as J/°C. The heat capacity of an object is an amount of energy divided by a temperature change, which has the dimension L 2 ⋅M⋅T −2 ...
The corresponding expression for the ratio of specific heat capacities remains the same since the thermodynamic system size-dependent quantities, whether on a per mass or per mole basis, cancel out in the ratio because specific heat capacities are intensive properties. Thus:
Scots-Irish physicist Lord Kelvin was the first to formulate a concise definition of thermodynamics in 1854 [2] which stated, "Thermo-dynamics is the subject of the relation of heat to forces acting between contiguous parts of bodies, and the relation of heat to electrical agency."
Thermal physics, generally speaking, is the study of the statistical nature of physical systems from an energetic perspective. Starting with the basics of heat and temperature, thermal physics analyzes the first law of thermodynamics and second law of thermodynamics from the statistical perspective, in terms of the number of microstates corresponding to a given macrostate.