Advances in Chemical Engineering & Technology

Biography

Biography: Catherine Kari Derow

Abstract

It seems that the law regarding nature abhorring voids is actually a higher level gloss on the truth.  The reasoning as to why voids are ‘abhorred’ is that particles in say the gas phase will collide against and crush a container with a void inside as the motion of the particles leads to collisions with the outer walls of the container and there are no matching collisions from inside the container to stop the container being crushed until there is no room for a void inside.  Alternatively if the container is opened then the motion of gas particles leads them to fill the container. So voids being ‘abhorred’ is a higher level interpreation of a rule that follows from the kinetic motion of particles.  Indeed the same would happen if the container with a void inside were placed in liquid and would happen albeit more slowly even if the container were immersed in a solid as eventually the vibrations of the solid particles would most likely crush the container into a state where it could no longer house a void.

Likewise that everything tends to chaos is a higher level interpretation of the fact that particles are always in motion and thus eroding order with vibrations or collisions.  Thus the energy of particles in a solid is likely to cause some erosion of the order in the solid, liquid or gas.  It is the kinetic energy of gas particles knocking against materials that causes them to be eroded into more chaos instead of keeping their ordered structure.  Consider that a liquid at room temperature eventually turns to the more disordered gas phase as kinetic motion of particles leads to evaporation.  At very low temperatures where kinetic motion even of what were at room temperature gas particles slows/stops, the tendency to chaos is very much reduced but the motion within the atoms would still prevail to turn materials to chaos very slowly e.g., isotopes might still disintegrate into the next type of atom it decays to.