Ultimately, in fact, it is the total internal energy of the system that we want to relate to the temperature, which means having to deal with those pesky specific heats I introduced in the previous se...Ultimately, in fact, it is the total internal energy of the system that we want to relate to the temperature, which means having to deal with those pesky specific heats I introduced in the previous section. (As an aside, the calculation of specific heats was one of the great challenges to the theoretical physicists of the late 19th and early 20th century, and eventually led to the introduction of quantum mechanics—but that is another story!)
