✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

5. Thermodynamics — Introduction to Statistical Mechanics

web.stanford.edu · 5,555 words · saved by 1 readers

Statistical mechanics grew out of an earlier field called thermodynamics, which was concerned with the thermal properties of liquids and gasses. It grew up around it, and then subsumed it. What we now call “classical thermodynamics” was developed over a period of several hundred years, but much of the most important work was done in just a few decades from the 1820s through the 1850s. It is not at all a coincidence, of course, that this burst of activity coincided with the industrial revolution and the development of the locomotive. Classical thermodynamics was largely developed by people who wanted to learn how to make better steam engines. Statistical mechanics has come a long way from these humble beginnings, but thermodynamics is still an important field in its own right. In this chapter, I will discuss some of the most important results of classical thermodynamics as seen from a modern statistical viewpoint. In everything that has come so far, we have considered only systems that

5. Thermodynamics - Introduction to Statistical Mechanics Navigation index next | previous | Introduction to Statistical Mechanics >> 5. Thermodynamics ¶ Statistical mechanics grew out of an earlier field called thermodynamics, which was concerned with the thermal properties of liquids and gasses. It grew up around it, and then subsumed it. What we now call “classical thermodynamics” was developed over a period of several hundred years, but much of the most important work was done in just a few decades from the 1820s through the 1850s. It is not at all a coincidence, of course, tha

Explore this link on the map →

related reading