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Statistical Mechanics (and Condensed Matter)

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The first mathematical, natural science of emergent properties. (I hedge this way, because one could argue that economics and evolutionary theory are both, also, concerned with emergent properties --- efficient allocation, and adaptation and speciation, respectively, and they preceeded statistical mechanics.) The heart of the subject is figuring out what happens when vast numbers of particles bounce around and into each other, all obeying the laws of mechanics (classical or quantum as the case may be). Things I Want to Understand Better: Phase transitions and critical phenoma; the renormalization group; field-theory methods; what happens far from equilibrium (more specifically, are there action principles or the like that govern probability distributions of trajectories, the way thermodynamic potentials govern equilibrium configurations); "soft" condensed matter; biological applications; amorphous materials and glasses; connections between spin glasses and biology (e.g., perceptrons);

Statistical Mechanics (and Condensed Matter) Notebooks Statistical Mechanics (and Condensed Matter) Last update : 21 Apr 2025 21:17 First version : 28 March 1997; substantial edit, 1 April 2003 The first mathematical, natural science of emergent properties . (I hedge this way, because one could argue that economics and evolutionary theory are both, also, concerned with emergent properties --- efficient allocation, and adaptation and speciation, respectively, and they preceeded statistical mechanics.) The heart of the subject is figuring out what happens when vast numbers of particles bounce ar

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