Concepts in thermal physics

Abstract

Thermal physics forms a key part of any undergraduate physics course. It includes the fundamentals of classical thermodynamics (which was founded largely in the nineteenth century and motivated by a desire to understand the conversion of heat into work using engines) and also statistical mechanics (which was founded by Boltzmann and Gibbs, and is concerned with the statistical behaviour of the underlying microstates of the system). Students often find these topics hard, and this problem is not helped by a lack of familiarity with basic concepts in mathematics, particularly in probability and statistics. Moreover, the traditional focus of thermodynamics on steam engines seems remote and largely irrelevant to a twenty-first century student. This is unfortunate since an understanding of thermal physics is crucial to almost all modern physics and to the important technological challenges which face us in this century. The aim of this book is to provide an introduction to the key concepts in thermal physics, fleshed out with plenty of modern examples from astrophysics, atmospheric physics, laser physics, condensed matter physics and information theory. The important mathematical principles, particularly concerning probability and statistics, are expounded in some detail. This aims to make up for the material which can no longer be automatically assumed to have been covered in every school mathematics course. In addition, the appendices contain useful mathematics, such as various integrals, mathematical results and identities. There is unfortunately no shortcut to mastering the necessary mathematics in studying thermal physics, but the material in the appendix provides a useful aide-m´emoire.