"In The Kind of Motion We Call Heat, Clausius had shown how to relate the temperature and pressure of a volume of gas to the motion of the atoms, and was able to deduce their average speed. ...That calculation drew a quick response from the Dutch meteorologist Christopher Buys Ballot. ...It atoms were really flying through the air at hundreds of meters per second, shouldn't the fragrant vapors of a hot dinner race through the room...? In figuring out the answer... Clausias added a fundamentally new innovation to gas theory. Atoms... banged into each other a good deal. ...battling through all the other atoms ...What mattered was the average distance between collisions. This turned out to be an all-important quantity... and Clausius gave it the name mean free path."
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David Lindley, Boltzmann's Atom: The Great Debate that Launched a Revolution in Physics (2001)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rudolf_Clausius
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Rudolf Clausius
Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius (2 January 1822 –24 August 1888) was a German physicist and mathematician. He is considered one of the founders of the science of thermodynamics. By his restatement of Sadi Carnot's principle known as the Carnot cycle, he provided a more fundamental foundation for the theory of heat. His most important paper, On the Moving Force of Heat (1850) was first to declare the second law of thermodynamics. He introduced the concept of entropy in 1865, and the virial theorem
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