Intuitive

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:

• http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/sft.html

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.