Ch 10Thermal Properties of Matter — Class 11 Physics, concept-first.

WBCHSE's Unit 7 "Properties of Bulk Matter" closes its third and final sub-topic by turning from the mechanical response of solids and fluids (how they deform under stress, and how fluids exert pressu…

A temperature scale is constructed by choosing two fixed points -- physical states that are easily and reproducibly obtained in a laboratory, each assigned a fixed numerical temperature value by conve…

When the temperature of a solid is raised, the atoms making up its crystal lattice vibrate about their mean (equilibrium) positions with a larger average amplitude.

A liquid has no fixed shape of its own -- it simply takes the shape of whatever vessel holds it -- so it makes no sense to talk about a liquid's "length" or "area" changing with temperature.

The general rule that a liquid's volume increases steadily as it is heated, and correspondingly decreases steadily as it is cooled, is one that ordinary water spectacularly breaks over a narrow but cr…

Experience shows that different substances need very different quantities of heat energy to produce the same rise in temperature, even when equal masses are compared -- heating a kilogram of water by…

Calorimetry is the branch of thermal physics concerned with measuring quantities of heat, and the whole subject rests on one guiding idea, the principle of calorimetry, which is nothing more than the…

Matter, as studied at this level, is ordinarily found in one of three states: solid, liquid, or gas. A substance can be made to pass from one of these states to another by supplying heat to it, or by…

Heat, wherever a temperature difference exists, always moves from the hotter region towards the colder one, and it does so by one (or more) of three physically distinct mechanisms.

Convection is the second mode of heat transfer, and it is possible only within a fluid -- a liquid or a gas -- because, unlike conduction, it works by the actual bulk (large-scale) movement of the hea…

Radiation is the third and last mode of heat transfer, and it is fundamentally different from both conduction and convection in one crucial respect: it needs no material medium at all.

Section 10.11 introduced two separate properties of any surface -- its absorptive power and its emissive power -- and noted, without proof, that good absorbers also tend to be good emitters.

A black body is an idealised surface (introduced in Section 10.11) that absorbs the entirety of the electromagnetic radiation falling on it, at every single wavelength, reflecting none of it and trans…

While Wien's displacement law (Section 10.13) describes where, in the spectrum, a black body's emission is concentrated, it says nothing about how much total energy the black body is radiating altoget…

The exact, corrected radiation law of Section 10.14, , is completely general but mathematically awkward to use in many everyday situations, since it involves the fourth power of two absolute temperatu…

- Heat is energy transferred between bodies because of a temperature difference; temperature is the property that decides the direction of that transfer, measured on the Celsius, Fahrenheit, or (SI, a…

Sample papers and previous-year board questions for this subject.