Friday, April 24, 2009
20 key concepts in thermodynamics and condensed matter
I have just finished revising my lecture for monday 9 a.m. I will mostly review my slant on 11 key ideas from thermodynamics. I will then just flag 9 key ideas that I hope I will be able to teach the students during the next 6 weeks (13 lectures, 4 tutorials). Any feedback is welcome.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Self-organised criticality and emergence in economics
A nice preprint illustrates how emergence is central to some of the biggest questions in economics and finance. Emergent phenomena occur as ...
-
Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro... -
If you look on the arXiv and in Nature journals there is a continuing stream of people claiming to observe superconductivity in some new mat...
-
I welcome discussion on this point. I don't think it is as sensitive or as important a topic as the author order on papers. With rega...
Related to concept 10 (free energy), I think that a key concept in the practical application of thermodynamics is the idea that "the entropy of the universe tends toward a maximum" is equivalent to "the Gibbs free energy of the system (at constant T and P) tends toward a minimum" and the corresponding statement about Helmholtz free energy. This allows one to use just the state properties of the system to determine the direction of change and equilibrium conditions, rather than having to worry about the entire universe!
ReplyDelete