Statistical Mechanics
Intuitive
Explanations in this section should contain no formulas, but instead colloquial things like you would hear them during a coffee break or at a cocktail party.
Concrete
Recommended Resources:
- What is Statistical Mechanics? by Roman Frigg
- The Principles of Statistical Mechanics by Richard C. Tolman
- See also this review, and part 2.
- A great explanation how one can derive the Boltzmann distribution from the principle of maximal entropy is given at page 3 in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.0813.pdf
- Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics by F. Reif
- A crash course in Statistical Mechanics https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/noahmiller/files/statistical_mechanics.pdf
Abstract
Source: Where do quantum field theories come from? by McGreevy
Recommended Resources:
Why is it interesting?
Statistical mechanics is a framework that allows us to describe systems with many degrees of freedom, although we don't know all the microscopic details. For example, using statistical mechanics we can describe a gas or a block of metal, although we don't know all individual atom configurations.