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2. The Statistical Description of Physical Systems — Introduction to Statistical Mechanics

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Given a physical system, how do you apply statistics to describe it? What does that even mean? There are lots of aspects of the system you might try to compute statistics for, but what approach is the most useful? This chapter will attempt to answer these questions by introducing the basic techniques and concepts of statistical mechanics. Along the way, we will define quantities with names like “temperature”, “pressure”, and “entropy”. Of course you have heard these words before and you probably have an idea of what you think they mean. For the moment, try to put those ideas aside. In Chapter 4 we will come back to them and try to build up an intuitive understanding of these quantities. But for now, just treat them as mathematical definitions. To describe an isolated physical system with statistics, we begin by making the following fundamental assumption: Assumption The system can exist in a discrete (but possibly infinite) set of microstates. A microstate defines the values of all pos

2. The Statistical Description of Physical Systems - Introduction to Statistical Mechanics Navigation index next | previous | Introduction to Statistical Mechanics >> 2. The Statistical Description of Physical Systems ¶ Given a physical system, how do you apply statistics to describe it? What does that even mean? There are lots of aspects of the system you might try to compute statistics for, but what approach is the most useful? This chapter will attempt to answer these questions by introducing the basic techniques and concepts of statistical mechanics. Along the way, we will define quantitie

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