From time to time a few posters, probably with good intentions, have claimed that the translational velocity of an object can be construed as contributing to its temperature. Others, hopefully also intending to be helpful, have strongly disagreed. This disagreement about motion and temperature has ignited heated debate. Every time the issue comes up, coals are fanned into hot flames. What does official professional Physics say about it motion and temperature? Modern University Physics by James A. Richards, Drexel Institute of Technology .....Francis Weston Sears, Dartmouth College .....M. Russell Wehr, Drexel Institute of Technology .....Mark W. Zemansky, College of the City of New York Addison - Wesley publishing co., inc. Reading, Massacheusetts, USA Copyright 1960 Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 60-8246 Page: 948 Chapter: 44 Verse: third down from top of page "One answer to the achievement of suitable temperature is already implied by our discussion. We do not need temperature as such. What we need is high-velocity particles. Although both the sun and the H-bomb produce these velocities with thermal energy, all the fusion reactions have been produced on a small scale by using particle accelerators. We have seen that the kinetic energy of a particle moving with the most probable speed in a maxwellian distribution for a group of particles at room temperature, 293K, is 0.025 ev. By stretching the concept of temperature from a statistical property associated with the random motion of all the atoms or molecules in a piece of gross matter to a description of individual particle energy we get a new concept, called kinetic temperature. Thus any particle with 0.025 ev of energy has a kinetic temperature of 293K. Multiplying each of these quantities by 4 x 10ex4, we find that any particle having 1 kev of energy has a kinetic temperature of 11.6 million K. A well-thrown baseball may may have a kinetic temperature of one hundred billion billion electron volts or about a million billion billion degrees kelvin. Calculations show that it may be possible to maintain fusion continuously at a temperature as low as 45 million degrees. Charged particles may be given this kinetic temperature by accelerating them through a mere 4000-volt potential difference."
