Interpreting phenomena as heating or cooling in the $p$-$V$ plane

Question

At 43:40 of this video lecture, the instructor interprets the path along $p$-$V$ curve as cooling and I don't exactly understand how he inferred this.
It's quite obvious if you introduce in the gas law, $pV=nRT$ but the context was about general gases, so what is the general way of arguing that it would be cooling with the basis of some property more general?

Sarthak Girdhar · Answer

Forget about equations and other stuff. Temperature is simply a measure of the kinetic energy of the constituent particles. So, in that link, in the first diagram, the professor has decreased pressure while keeping the container's volume constant. Well, this means that in the same container, the particles are now bouncing back and forth less frequently than they were before, which is another way of saying that their speeds have reduced.

Answered by Sarthak Girdhar on January 14, 2021

Interpreting phenomena as heating or cooling in the $p$-$V$ plane

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