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.

Layman

Student

Recommended Resources:

• What is Statistical Mechanics? by Roman Frigg
• 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

Researcher

Recommended Resources:

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

Examples

Example1

Example2:

History