For a gas in a mass-sealed container, average vx, vy, vz are also zero, just as in the shaft, so this trivially matches.
Yes, but the average tells you little that’s meaningful: it’s equivalent to the overall velocity of the gas as whole.
I agree with your overall point. Temperature is not directly a property of the system, but of how we can characterize it, including what constraints there are on it. I just think that this wasn’t a great example for that point of view, precisely because you claimed agreement of distributions that doesn’t exist.
A better way to say explain this can use the shaft. A shaft has the very strong constraint that position and velocity are perfectly correlated. This constraint lets us extract virtually all the kinetic energy out. A gas that had the same distribution of velocities, but lacked this constraint, would be very hard to extract useful energy from. No simple arrangement could do much better than treating it as a thermalized gas with the same average kinetic energy (and it would quickly evolve so that the velocity distribution would match this).
Yes, but the average tells you little that’s meaningful: it’s equivalent to the overall velocity of the gas as whole.
I agree with your overall point. Temperature is not directly a property of the system, but of how we can characterize it, including what constraints there are on it. I just think that this wasn’t a great example for that point of view, precisely because you claimed agreement of distributions that doesn’t exist.
A better way to say explain this can use the shaft. A shaft has the very strong constraint that position and velocity are perfectly correlated. This constraint lets us extract virtually all the kinetic energy out. A gas that had the same distribution of velocities, but lacked this constraint, would be very hard to extract useful energy from. No simple arrangement could do much better than treating it as a thermalized gas with the same average kinetic energy (and it would quickly evolve so that the velocity distribution would match this).
Sure it does—it just requires a special shaft shaping/material. Hence the “a metal shaft could …”
Otherwise, we’re in agreement.