Dr. Michael Katz - Porous Materials

The Ideal Gas Law

Gases aren't sitting still — they're made of countless tiny particles zipping around in random directions, constantly colliding with each other and with the walls of whatever contains them. The hotter the gas, the faster those particles move. This is the core idea of kinetic molecular theory, and it's exactly what's happening inside the flask below.

Pressure is just force spread over an area — how hard something pushes divided by how much surface it's pushing on. In a gas, that "push" comes from countless tiny collisions: every time a particle slams into the container wall, it transfers a little momentum. The more often that happens, and the harder each hit lands, the more total force is stacking up on the surface — and that's what you're seeing measured live as pressure.