What exactly is pressure?

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I can’t seem to wrap my head around the term pressure.

Vehicle tyres use air pressure, toilets faucets etc use pressure (presumably water pressure),
pressing onto something applies pressure, our blood has pressure, temperature is also affected by “pressure”.
I know there are various types of pressure, and I can’t think of any more examples at the moment, but my point is “pressure” sounds like a very arbitrary or vague umbrella term to me.

Help me make sense of it?

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14 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

When you get small enough, everything has a force that attracts things and a force that repels them. The attraction force keeps the parts of things like atoms from flying apart. The repel force keeps them all from crunching together. You can think of those forces like tiny springs.

Imagine you have a ball made of springs. If it’s out in the open it’s in equilibrium – it’s not flying away or collapsing in. Now imagine you take that ball in your hands and start squeezing it down. The more you crush it the more the repelling force pushes against you. The tighter you squeeze, the harder it gets to push even more.

What you feel when the springs are trying to push outward is pressure. The more you can squeeze it the harder those springs will try to get back to equilibrium, so the more pressure you will feel

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