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(This is also applies to ideal gas law related topics, like Boyle's law, Charles's law, Gay-Lussac's law, etc.)

On a recent question about how a bottle of air behaves when the temperature changes, a commenter said:

This isn't a chemistry question [$\ldots$] This is just physics.

While the commenter didn't explicitly say that the question was off-topic for not being about chemistry, and should not have been asked at this site on that basis, that was the implication I read into it.

While for me the ideal gas law and related laws were always covered as part of the chemistry curriculum, I realize that there may be regional variation and a difference in opinion on this topic, hence my question to make it official:

Are questions on the ideal gas law on-topic for this site, or should they be closed or moved to some other site?

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  • $\begingroup$ They are fine. We even have a special tag for such questions: gas-laws. $\endgroup$ Jan 14, 2017 at 18:41
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    $\begingroup$ Meh, they're not hurting anything. I personally thing the commenter was upset at something other than the on-topicality of the question. $\endgroup$
    – M.A.R.
    Jan 14, 2017 at 18:43

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Yes, they should be on topic.
(This is my personal point of view; if you agree, please up-vote it to make it consensus.)

Obviously questions about gas laws are also on topic on physics, but that has never been (nor will ever be) a reason to make it off-topic on another site of the network.

Since gas laws are almost everywhere also part of the chemical curriculum, as well as an elemental part in thermodynamics, it is hard to imagine how our site could function without them.

We have a tag for them and there are already (I don't know, I'm on mobile) many (good) questions on the topic.

With this particular question, however, I have some issues. Mainly this is because it is a wall of text and it asks us to watch a YouTube video for referral, which can disappear at any given moment. But that's a different story. When asked in a more external-link-free fashion, I think it is a good fit for our site.

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  • $\begingroup$ Strongly agree. It's pretty difficult to have a clear discussion of non-trivial gas-phase chemistry if you are forbidden from using the laws listed in this question. $\endgroup$
    – airhuff
    Jan 15, 2017 at 6:13
  • $\begingroup$ I studied Gas Laws in school under Physics, and under Chemistry as well. But the approaches to the subject were quite different, as expected. $\endgroup$
    – NVZ
    Jan 19, 2017 at 14:17

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