The gas laws… We all learned about them in school and promptly forgot all about them. I really think that we need to dig our books out, dust that information off, and work to understand and apply it.
Let’s start by looking at pressure a little differently. Pressure is a measure of the force exerted by a gas within a container. It exerts pressure because the individual molecules of the gas are colliding with the walls of the container. Those collisions are happening because each molecule has a specific amount of energy. So, in this way, we can view pressure as a measure of the amount of existing energy within our container of gas. That might sound complicated, so let’s unpack it and see if we can understand it better.