Documentation: The Royal Road to Promotion

2021 ◽  
pp. 115-116
Author(s):  
Howard Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Olivier Darrigol

This chapter recounts how Boltzmann reacted to Hermann Helmholtz’s analogy between thermodynamic systems and a special kind of mechanical system (the “monocyclic systems”) by grouping all attempts to relate thermodynamics to mechanics, including the kinetic-molecular analogy, into a family of partial analogies all derivable from what we would now call a microcanonical ensemble. At that time, Boltzmann regarded ensemble-based statistical mechanics as the royal road to the laws of thermal equilibrium (as we now do). In the same period, he returned to the Boltzmann equation and the H theorem in reply to Peter Guthrie Tait’s attack on the equipartition theorem. He also made a non-technical survey of the second law of thermodynamics seen as a law of probability increase.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Etsuo Uchida ◽  
Yuichiro Sakurai ◽  
Rathborith Cheng ◽  
Ichita Shimoda ◽  
Yu Saito

2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (7) ◽  
pp. 468-469
Author(s):  
E.A. Guthrie
Keyword(s):  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document