Physics: Gay-Lussac's law

Gay-Lussac's law Gay-Lussac's law usually refers to Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac's law of combining volumes of gases, discovered in 1808 and published in 1809.

Commentary

Commentary

Gay-Lussac's law Gay-Lussac's law usually refers to Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac's law of combining volumes of gases, discovered in 1808 and published in 1809.

Commentary

Why does Gay-Lussac's law matter? This principle is one of the building blocks physicists use to explain the world. Without it, a whole class of phenomena would have no mathematical description. Engineers, chemists, and astronomers all rely on it.

Commentary

Background: Gay-Lussac's law Gay-Lussac's law usually refers to Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac's law of combining vo lumes of gases, discovered in 1808 and published in 1809. However, it sometimes refers to the proportionality of the volume of a gas to its absolute temperature at constant pressure. The latter law was published by Gay-Lussac in 1802, but in the article in which he described his work, he cited earlier unpublished work from the 1780s by Jacques Charles. Consequently, the volume-temperature proportionality is usually known as Charles's law.