Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Statistical Thermodynamics
    Statistical Thermodynamics
    Statistical Thermodynamics
    Ebook137 pages1 hour

    Statistical Thermodynamics

    By Erwin Schrödinger

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    In this concise volume, one of the founder of quantum mechanics and one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the century (Nobel laureate, 1933) attempts to develop a simple, unified standard method of dealing with all cases of statistical thermodynamics (classical, quantum, Bose-Einstein, Fermi-Dirac, etc.)
    The level of discussion is relatively advanced. As Professor Schrödinger remarks in the Introduction: "It is not a first introduction for newcomers to the subject, but rather a 'repetitorium.' The treatment of those topics which are to be found in every one of a hundred text-books is severely condensed; on the other hand, vital points which are usually passed over in all but the large monographs (such as Fowler's and Tolman's) are dealt with at greater level."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateApr 9, 2013
    ISBN9780486318608
    Statistical Thermodynamics

    Related to Statistical Thermodynamics

    Titles in the series (100)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Physics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Dark Energy?

      Dec 29, 2022

      Dark Energy?
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Sacred, Spherical Cows of Physics: Theoretical physics milks symmetry to power its newest tool.

      May 1, 2014

      Early in their training, many physics students come across the idea of spherical cows. Cows in the real world—even at their most plump and well-fed—are hardly spherical, and this makes it tricky to calculate things like, say, how their volume or surf

      11 min read

    • Article

      Dancing To A Galactic Death

      Dec 1, 2022

      Dancing To A Galactic Death
      1 min read

    • Article

      What Keeps Black Holes From Expanding Everywhere?

      Dec 10, 2018

      Black holes are somehow able to grow constantly without changing their size. Physics might finally be able to explain why.

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Search For Wormholes

      Aug 11, 2022

      The Search For Wormholes
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Math of Living Things

      Jun 23, 2021

      It’s hard to argue with the famously authoritative Oxford English Dictionary, but its definition of physics as the “branch of science concerned with the nature and properties of non-living matter and energy” is incomplete because physics studies livi

      8 min read

    • Article

      A Brief History of the Grand Unified Theory of Physics

      Mar 16, 2017

      Particle physicists had two nightmares before the Higgs particle was discovered in 2012. The first was that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator would see precisely nothing. For if it did, it would likely be the last large accelerator

      18 min read

    • Article

      Five Veteran Scientists Tell Us What Most Surprised Them: Fifty years ago, who knew we’d learn to clone genes and find water on Mars?

      Sep 24, 2015

      Turn back the clock to 1965. Science appeared to be marching forward at an unrelenting pace. Biochemists had cracked the genetic code (how DNA translates into proteins), inspiring Life magazine to envision “superbabies with improved minds and bodies.

      7 min read

    • Article

      'When Einstein Walked With Gödel' Is Science Writing At Its Best

      May 22, 2018

      Jim Holt's collected essays are like a series of dispatches from the larger scientific world inhabited by Einstein and Gödel.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Actually, There Is a Time Like the Present

      Nov 30, 2017

      We’ve all heard it before: There’s no time like the present. Broadly speaking, of course, it means to “seize the opportunity right now,” or maybe in my case, to avoid procrastinating. From a psychological perspective, this makes a lot of sense. As hu

      4 min read

    • Article

      Is The Law Of Conservation Of Energy Cancelled?

      Dec 12, 2019

      Physics is often baffling, but one principle seems rock-solid: the law of conservation of energy. The world contains this thing called “energy” whose amount never changes. It can change its form or go from one body to another, but its total amount re

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Trouble with Theories of Everything: There is no known physics theory that is true at every scale—there may never be.

      Oct 1, 2015

      Whenever you say anything about your daily life, a scale is implied. Try it out. “I’m too busy” only works for an assumed time scale: today, for example, or this week. Not this century or this nanosecond. “Taxes are onerous” only makes sense for a ce

      8 min read

    • Article

      How Physics Is Like Three-Chord Rock: Like a set of common chords, the same math appears in diverse fields of physics.

      Jun 12, 2014

      A few years back, 12 million of us clicked over to watch the “Pachelbel Rant” on YouTube. You might remember it. Strumming repetitive chords on his guitar, comedian Rob Paravonian confessed that when he was a cellist, he couldn’t stand the Pachelbel

      6 min read

    • Article

      Time Flows Toward Order

      Dec 2, 2020

      The one law of physics that virtually all scientists believe will never be found to be wrong is the second law of thermodynamics. Despite this exalted status, it has long been associated with a great mystery and a bleak implication. The mystery is th

      9 min read

    • Article

      Schrödinger’s Cat When Nobody Is Looking

      Aug 26, 2020

      Some of the most perplexing topics in physics revolve around quantum theory. The quandary is seen most famously in the Schrödinger’s cat question and the issue of information loss in black hole evaporation. Richard Feynman said, “I think that I can s

      13 min read

    • Article

      Infinite Energy

      Apr 19, 2021

      Infinite Energy
      11 min read

    • Article

      Will Quantum Mechanics Swallow Relativity?

      Jun 8, 2017

      It is the biggest of problems, it is the smallest of problems. At present physicists have two separate rulebooks explaining how nature works. There is general relativity, which beautifully accounts for gravity and all of the things it dominates: orbi

      17 min read

    • Article

      Will Quantum Mechanics Swallow Relativity?: The contest between gravity and quantum physics takes a new turn.

      Oct 29, 2015

      It is the biggest of problems, it is the smallest of problems. At present physicists have two separate rulebooks explaining how nature works. There is general relativity, which beautifully accounts for gravity and all of the things it dominates: orbi

      17 min read

    • Article

      How Black Holes Nearly Ruined Time

      Jan 24, 2019

      An Introduction to the Black Hole Institute Fittingly, the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) was founded 100 years after Karl Schwarzschild solved Einstein’s equations for general relativity—a solution that described a black hole decades before the first a

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Universe Began With a Big Melt, Not a Big Bang

      Oct 5, 2017

      There are two tantalizing mysteries about our universe, one dealing with its final fate and the other with its beginning, that have intrigued cosmologists for decades. The community has always believed these to be independent problems—but what if the

      10 min read

    • Article

      A Supermassive Lens On The Constants Of Nature

      Nov 25, 2020

      The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics went to three researchers who confirmed that Einstein’s general relativity predicts black holes, and established that the center of our own galaxy houses a supermassive black hole with the equivalent of 4 million suns

      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Statistical Thermodynamics

    3.5/5

    5 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Statistical Thermodynamics - Erwin Schrödinger

      1952

      CHAPTER I

      GENERAL INTRODUCTION

      THE object of this seminar is to develop briefly one simple, unified standard method, capable of dealing, without changing the fundamental attitude, with all cases (classical, quantum, Bose-Einstein, Fermi-Dirac, etc.) and with every new problem that may arise. The interest is focused on the general procedure, and examples are dealt with as illustrations thereof. It is not a first introduction for newcomers to the subject, but rather a ‘repetitorium’. The treatment of those topics which are to be found in every one of a hundred text-books is severely condensed; on the other hand, vital points which are usually passed over in all but the large monographs (such as Fowler’s and Tolman’s) are dealt with at greater length.

      There is, essentially, only one problem in statistical thermodynamics: the distribution of a given amount of energy E over N identical systems. Or perhaps better: to determine the distribution of an assembly of N identical systems over the possible states in which this assembly can find itself, given that the energy of the assembly is a constant E. The idea is that there is weak interaction between them, so weak that the energy of interaction can be disregarded, that one can speak of the ‘private’ energy of every one of them and that the sum of their ‘private’ energies has to equal E. The distinguished role of the energy is, therefore, simply that it is a constant of the motion—the one that always exists, and, in general, the only one. The generalization to the case, that there are others besides (momenta, moments of momentum), is obvious; it has occasionally been contemplated, but in terrestrial, as opposed to astrophysical, thermodynamics it has hitherto not acquired any importance.

      ‘To determine the distribution’ means in principle to make oneself familiar with any possible distribution-of-the-energy (or state-of-the-assembly), to classify them in a suitable way, i.e. in the way suiting the purpose in question and to count the numbers in the classes, so as to be able to judge of the probability of certain features or characteristics turning up in the assembly. The questions that can arise in this respect are of the most varied nature, and so the classification really needed in a special problem can be of the most varied nature, especially in relation to the fineness of classification. At one end of the scale we have the general question of finding out those features which are common to almost all possible states of the assembly so that we may safely contend that they ‘almost always’ obtain. In this case we have well-nigh only one class—actually two, but the second one has a negligibly small content. At the other end of the scale we have such a detailed question as: volume ( = number of states of the assembly) of the ‘class’ in which one individual member is in a particular one of its states. Maxwell’s law of velocity distribution is the best-known example.

      This is the mathematical problem—always the same; we shall soon present its general solution, from which in the case of every particular kind of system every particular classification that may be desirable can be found as a special case.

      But there are two different attitudes as regards the physical application of the mathematical result. We shall later, for obvious reasons, decidedly favour one of them; for the moment, we must explain them both.

      The older and more naive application is to N actually existing physical systems in actual physical interaction with each other, e.g. gas molecules or electrons or Planck oscillators or degrees of freedom (‘ether oscillators’) of a ‘hohlraum’. The N of them together represent the actual physical system under consideration. This original point of view is associated with the names of Maxwell, Boltzmann and others.

      But it suffices only for dealing with a very restricted class of physical systems—virtually only with gases. It is not applicable to a system which does not consist of a great number of identical constituents with ‘private’ energies. In a solid the interaction between neighbouring atoms is so strong that you cannot mentally divide up its total energy into the private energies of its atoms. And even a ‘hohlraum’ (an ‘ether block’ considered as the seat of electromagnetic-field events) can only be resolved into oscillators of many—infinitely many—different types, so that it would be necessary at least to deal with an assembly of an infinite number of different assemblies, composed of different constituents.

      Hence a second point of view (or, rather, a different application of the same mathematical results), which we owe to Willard Gibbs, has been developed. It has a particular beauty of its own, is applicable quite generally to every physical system, and has some advantages to be mentioned forthwith. Here the N identical systems are mental copies of the one system under consideration—of the one macroscopic device that is actually erected on our laboratory table. Now what on earth could it mean, physically, to distribute a given amount of energy E over these N mental copies? The idea is, in my view, that you can, of course, imagine that you really had N copies of your system, that they really were in ‘weak interaction’ with each other, but isolated from the rest of the world. Fixing your attention on one of them, you find it in a peculiar kind of ‘heat-bath’ which consists of the N − 1 others.

      Now you have, on the one hand, the experience that in thermodynamical equilibrium the behaviour of a physical system which you place in a heat-bath is always the same whatever be the nature of the heat-bath that keeps it at constant temperature, provided, of course, that the bath is chemically neutral towards your system, i.e. that there is nothing else but heat exchange between them. On the other hand, the statistical calculations do not refer to the mechanism of interaction; they only assume that it is ‘purely mechanical’, that it does not affect the nature of the single systems (e.g. that it never blows them to pieces), but merely transfers energy from one to the other.

      These considerations suggest that we may regard the behaviour of any one of those N systems as describing the one actually existing system when placed in a heat-bath of given temperature. Moreover, since the N systems are alike and under similar conditions, we can then obviously, from their simultaneous statistics, judge of the probability of finding our system, when placed in a heat-bath of given temperature, in one or other of its private states. Hence all questions concerning the system in a heat-bath can be answered.

      We adopt this point of view in principle—though all the following considerations may, with due care, also be applied to the other. The advantage consists not only in the general applicability, but also in the following two points:

      (i) N can be made arbitrarily large. In fact, in case of doubt, we always mean lim N = ∞ (infinitely large heat-bath). Hence the applicability, for example, of Stirling’s formula for N!, or for the factorials of ‘occupation numbers’ proportional to N (and thus going with N to infinity), need never be questioned.

      (ii) No question about the individuality of the members of the

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1