I have found the beginning of Chapter 6 to be very dry. To me it seems like it presents a lot of formulae all at once, and had I not seen some of that material before, I don't think I'd be able to take it in all at once. To that end, to anyone who is more interested in learning more about statistical thermodynamics I would recommend having a flick through the relevant chapters from Physical Chemistry by Atkins (any edition) or An Introduction to Thermal Physics by Schroeder. Having said that, we've probably already got a lot to digest!
It strikes me as odd in that in the entire Chapter 6 of Nelson, there is no mention of the equipartition theorem (where you have 1/2 kT of internal energy per degree of freedom in your system), but it is implied when Nelson presents a lot of results about ideal gases. I would have thought that it would be important to explain how you get, for example, the internal energy of an ideal gas, rather than just presenting the results and using them to derive other results. Perhaps it's more of a physicist thing to be concerned about the equipartition theorem - do 'biophysicists' not care about it as much?
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Having now read a bit more of chapter 6, I've found that on p220, Nelson talks about the 'equipartition of energy', with reference to one of the 'Your Turn' problems which appears on the previous page. However, it's still not used explicitly in the chapter.
ReplyDeleteHe probably does not introduce it because then he will have to introduce Hamiltonians, discuss quadratic terms in them, calculation of the partition function....
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