Erickson’s Reviews > Statistical Physics of Particles > Status Update
Erickson
is on page 35 of 330
Finished Chapter 1. I think this book is actually quite difficult to read, but it gives very general arguments and generalizations uncommon in other books I have seen for thermodynamics. I still find the "presentation" somewhat clunky sometimes; I had to read really carefully about Clausius' theorem to actually understand, even though Blundell made it really clear. Sometimes generalizations overcomplicate things too.
— Sep 24, 2021 07:36PM
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Erickson’s Previous Updates
Erickson
is on page 181 of 330
Finished skimming through Chapter 6; I think I know conceptually how to pass to quantum statistical mechanics from classical version. The rest are details.
— Dec 11, 2021 11:03AM
Erickson
is on page 143 of 330
Up to Section 5.5. To be honest at this point I barely skimmed the stuff, because the cluster and virial expansions are just messy. Conceptually however it is not too hard, I think, basically trying to do perturbative calculation using Feynman diagrammatics. Maybe it's because I am not reading too carefully, but a lot of explanations/calculations in this chapter are terse.
— Nov 27, 2021 11:22PM
Erickson
is on page 110 of 330
Starting Chapter 4, finished microcanonical part. I like this chapter better than the previous ones.
— Nov 04, 2021 11:12PM
Erickson
is on page 98 of 330
Finished Chapter 3 (kinetic theory of gases). The framework, big picture (especially the hydrodynamic part and H-theorem) is actually pretty nice. I still think the way this chapter is -presented- is unnecessarily convoluted and lacking logical signposting. At some point I lost track of all the characteristic scales of the problems. Being technical is one thing (it's grad level), but clarity is another issue.
— Nov 01, 2021 11:26PM
Erickson
is on page 78 of 330
Chapter 3 is really dense. I think this is the first time I went through derivation of Boltzmann equation via the full BBGKY hierarchy, and then impose coarse-graining (this has multi-scale), molecular chaos hypothesis, and then do scattering type change of coordinates all in one go. This really drives the point of how partition functions (statistical mechanics) make a lot of analysis easier for many systems.
— Oct 27, 2021 12:30AM
Erickson
is on page 53 of 330
Finished Chapter 2. Maybe I was being impatient, but I think this is quite difficult to read (except very quick but effective explanation of cumulant expansion). The problem is that this book is talking at "very high level", making readers who do not already know the subject *very well* easily lost in the text. I think some things are better left in Appendix.
— Oct 17, 2021 09:47PM
