Preface

Summary

In the preface to his book Statistical Mechanics Made Simple Professor Daniel Mattis writes:

My own experience in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a half century ago at M.I.T., consisted of a single semester of Sears, skillfully taught by the man himself. But it was a subject that seemed as distant from “real” physics as did poetry or French literature.

This frank but discouraging admission suggests that thermodynamics may not be a course eagerly anticipated by many students – not even physics, chemistry or engineering majors – and at completion I would suppose that few are likely to claim it was an especially inspiring experience. With such open aversion, the often disappointing performance on GRE questions covering the subject should not be a surprise. As a teacher of the subject I have often conjectured on reasons for this lack of enthusiasm.

Apart from its subtlety and perceived difficulty, which are probably immutable, I venture to guess that one problem might be that most curricula resemble the thermodynamics of nearly a century ago.

Another might be that, unlike other areas of physics with their epigrammatic equations – Newton's, Maxwell's or Schrödinger's, which provide accessibility and direction – thermal physics seems to lack a comparable unifying principle. Students may therefore fail to see conceptual or methodological coherence and experience confusion instead.

With those assumptions I propose in this book alternatives which try to address the disappointing experience of Professor Mattis and undoubtedly others.

Thermodynamics, the set of rules and constraints governing interconversion and dissipation of energy in macroscopic systems, can be regarded as having begun with Carnot's (1824) pioneering paper on heat-engine efficiency.