The Ideal Monatomic Gas

Today at the Topos Institute, Sophie Libkind, Owen Lynch and I spent some time talking about thermodynamics, Carnot engines and the like. As a result, I want to work out for myself some basic facts about the ideal gas. This stuff is all well-known, but I’m having trouble finding exactly what I want—and no more, thank you—collected in one place.

Just for background, the Carnot cycle looks roughly like this:

This is actually a very inaccurate picture, but it gets the point across. We have...