Elements of statistical thermodynamics

Statistical Thermodynamics - Fall 2009

Molecular theory can be considered as a preliminary to statistical physics. While the latter employs a more sophisticated formalism encompassing quantum-mechanical systems, the former operates with a classical ideal gas. Molecular theory studies the relation between the temperature of the gas and the kinetic energy of the molecules, pressure on the walls due to the impact of the molecules, dist...

Thermodynamics and Statistical Physics

Statistical thermodynamics of economic systems

We formulate thermodynamics of economic systems in terms of an arbitrary probability distribution for a conserved economic quantity. As in statistical physics, thermodynamic macroeconomic variables emerge as the mean value of microeconomic variables and their determination is reduced to the computation of the partition function, starting from an arbitrary function. Explicit hypothetical example...

Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics

The field of thermodynamics is easiest to understand in the context of Newtonian mechanics. Newtonian mechanics describes the effect of forces on objects. Thermodynamics describes the effect of heat transfer on objects. When heat is transferred,the temperature of an object changes.Temperature and heat are also intimately related to energy. A hot gas in a piston has a high pressure and it can do...

Statistical thermodynamics of clustered populations.

We present a thermodynamic theory for a generic population of M individuals distributed into N groups (clusters). We construct the ensemble of all distributions with fixed M and N, introduce a selection functional that embodies the physics that governs the population, and obtain the distribution that emerges in the scaling limit as the most probable among all distributions consistent with the g...