[yt-dev] Issue #912: Be careful about "thermal energy" uses in yt (yt_analysis/yt)

[Chris Malone]

New issue 912: Be careful about "thermal energy" uses in yt
https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt/issue/912/be-careful-about-thermal-energy-uses-in-yt

Chris Malone:

This came up in the comments of a PR.  In essence, @mzingale summarized the issue quite well:

"I'm a little concerned about the name thermal energy. We don't necessarily have thermal energy easily available [in Maestro]. We have internal energy, or gas energy, but when we are very degenerate, the internal energy is not thermal, so the name thermal energy is misleading and perhaps dangerous. Since this is a yt convention, maybe for these codes we should return an error if thermal energy is requested and perhaps we can define a more code-agnostic general name for the gas internal energy that can be used in situations where thermal energy is wrong."