User Tools

Site Tools


Sidebar


Add a new page:

formulas:maxwell_relations

This is an old revision of the document!


Maxwell Relations

Why is it interesting?

Layman

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.

Student

For a great explanation, why the Maxwell relations are "just a sneaky way of saying that the mixed partial derivatives of the function U commute". see https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/classical-mechanics-versus-thermodynamics-part-1/

(The fact that partial derivatives commute is known as Schwarz' theorem (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_relations . Schwarz' theorem is simply a way of stating "the fact that a function S doesn’t change when we go around a parallelogram" https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/classical-mechanics-versus-thermodynamics-part-2/)

Researcher

The motto in this section is: the higher the level of abstraction, the better.
Common Question 1
Common Question 2

Examples

Example1
Example2:

History

formulas/maxwell_relations.1509094850.txt.gz · Last modified: 2017/12/04 08:01 (external edit)