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formulas:maxwell_relations
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Maxwell Relations
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
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/)
Abstract
The motto in this section is: the higher the level of abstraction, the better.
Why is it interesting?
The Maxwell relations encode useful relationships between notions of thermodynamics.
formulas/maxwell_relations.1522078714.txt.gz · Last modified: 2018/03/26 15:38 (external edit)
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