History of chemistry 1808, certain of his central ideas were soon adopted by most chemists. However, uncertainty persisted for half a century about how atomic theory was to be configured and applied to concrete situations; chemists in different countries developed several different incompatible atomistic systems. A paper that suggested a way out of this difficult situation was published as early as 1811 by the Italian physicist Amedeo Avogadro (1776-1856), who hypothesized that equal volumes of gases at the same temperature and pressure contain equal numbers of molecules, from which it followed that relative molecular weights of any two gases are the same as
Kinetic theory of gases Kinetic theory of gases The kinetic theory of gases describes a gas as a large number of submicroscopic particles (atoms or molecules), all of which are in constant, rapid, random motion. The randomness arises from the particles' many collisions with each other and with the walls of the container. Kinetic theory of gases explains the macroscopic properties of gases, such as pressure, temperature, viscosity, thermal conductivity, and volume, by considering their molecular composition and motion. The theory posits that gas pressure results from particles' collisions with the walls of a container at different velocities. Kinetic molecular theory defines temperature in