Yet, for all its immense power, thermodynamics is a science that fails to reward man’s quest for understanding. By always increasing in the direction of spontaneous change, entropy indicates the turn, or direction, taken by all such change.įrom a union of the entropy and energy concepts, little more than a century ago, there was born a notably abstract science with innumerable concrete applications a science of thermodynamics that combines magnificent generality with unfailing reliability to a degree unrivaled by any other science known to man. This second conviction finds quantitative expression in the concept of entropy (from Gr. But we have too another conviction scarcely less intense: the conviction that the future will not repeat the past, that time unrolls unidirectionally, that the world is getting on.
ELEMENTS OF STATISTICAL THERMODYNAMICS NASH EPUB PLUS
The energy concept thus gives quantitative expression to our firm conviction that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
And energy-or, better, mass-energy-is surely conceived by us as a something constant enduring through all change. From the very beginning of the modern era, certain men (e.g., Descartes) have conceived that something in terms suggestive of what we would call energy. In every change, however drastic it may appear, we surmise a something that remains constant. Appropriate for introductory college chemistry courses, it further lends itself to use as a supplementary text for independent study by more advanced students. The concepts of equilibrium and entropy thus acquire new significance, and readers discover how thermodynamic parameters may be calculated from spectroscopic data.Įncompassing virtually all of the forms of statistical mechanics customary to undergraduate physical chemistry books, this brief text requires prior acquaintance with only the rudiments of the calculus and a few of the simplest propositions of classical thermodynamics. Starting with an analysis of some very simple microcanonical ensembles, it proceeds to the Boltzmann distribution law and a systematic exploration of the proper formulation, evaluation, and application of partition functions. This concise, elementary treatment illustrates the ways in which an atomic-molecular perspective yields new insights and powers operative in the realms of macroscopic thermodynamics.
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