You will learn to apply the general laws of energy and entropy to engines, refrigerators, chemical reactions, phase transformations, and mixtures. This book will give you a working understanding of thermal physics, assuming that you have already studied introductory physics and calculus. Alternatively, we can measure the bulk properties of a material, and from these infer something about the particles it is made of. So in thermal physics we assume that these motions are random, and we use the laws of probability to predict how the material as a whole ought to behave. We can't possibly follow every detail of the motions of so many particles. Examples include the air in a balloon, the water in a lake, the electrons in a chunk of metal, and the photons given off by the sun. Thermal physics deals with collections of large numbers of particles - typically 10 to the 23rd power or so. Includes applications of interest to physicists, physical chemists, and materials scientists, as well as materials, chemical, and mechanical engineers Suitable as a textbook for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and practicing researchers Develops content systematically with increasing order of complexity Self-contained, including nine appendices to handle necessary background and technical detailsĪn Introduction to Thermal Physics Book Description : Throughout the book, problems are posed and solved to illustrate specific results and problem-solving techniques. Additional topics include paramagnetism, adsorption on dilute sites, point defects in crystals, thermal aspects of intrinsic and extrinsic semiconductors, density matrix formalism, the Ising model, and an introduction to Monte Carlo simulation. A unified treatment of ideal classical, Fermi, and Bose gases is presented, including Bose condensation, degenerate Fermi gases, and classical gases with internal structure. Statistical mechanics is presented in the context of information theory to quantify entropy, followed by development of the most important ensembles: microcanonical, canonical, and grand canonical. These laws are applied systematically to topics such as phase equilibria, chemical reactions, external forces, fluid-fluid surfaces and interfaces, and anisotropic crystal-fluid interfaces. In Thermal Physics: Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics for Scientists and Engineers, the fundamental laws of thermodynamics are stated precisely as postulates and subsequently connected to historical context and developed mathematically. The text contains ample illustrations and examples of applications of thermodynamics in physics, engineering, and chemistry. Finn incorporated new sections on scales of temperature, availability, the degradation of energy, and lattice defects. In Thermal Physics, the author emphasizes understanding the basic ideas and shows how the important thermodynamics results can be simply obtained from the fundamental relations without getting lost in a maze of partial differentials.
Thermodynamics is an essential part of any physical sciences education, but it is so full of pitfalls and subtleties, that many students fail to appreciate its elegance and power. These are the hallmarks of books in the remarkable Physics and its Applications series. Concise yet thorough, accessible, authoritative, and affordable.