Goals of Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics
How do we describe large systems? How do we understand properties of systems with complex interactions? What is equilibrium and what is not equilibrium? What constitutes a phase transition and how is it characterized?
Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics seek to answer these and many other questions about emergent properties of bulk systems. In this course, we will get acquainted with the fundamentals of these two extremely broad subjects. A semester-long course is not enough to develop a deep understanding of the nuances of the multitude of phenomena described by these fundamentals.
We will start our discussions in an apparently disjoint corner of physics by spending some time revising the basics of classical mechanics. While many more sophisticated techniques have been developed over the years, for our purposes we will stick to Newtonian mechanics. Revisiting these fundamentals will simultaneously provide us with an idea of the questions that need to be asked about macroscopic systems, and why mechanics alone is not sufficient to answer these.
This will lead us onto thermodynamics, where we will establish various postulates and show how macroscopic behavior of equilibrium systems can indeed be quite uniform, lending them to be described by a unified theory that does not even need the knowledge of the structure and dynamics of these systems.