We regularly talk about things like temperature, wind, and humidity. Have you ever thought about what these quantities actually are? We’re surrounded by trillions and trillions of molecules, and these properties we feel in the air around us only emerges when we consider all of them together. Describing these quantities in concrete terms puzzled physicists for a long time. While some of the groundwork was laid in the 1700’s, the field of statistical mechanics really can into being in the mid 1800’s as a tool to explain thermodynamic processes. In this article, I’ll describe the history of statistical mechanics, and some of the basic concepts used by physicists today when thinking about large amounts of molecults.
The History
The origin of statistical mechanics can be traced to Daniel Bernoulli, a member of the famous Bernoulli Family which contributed substantially to mathematics and physics in the 1600’s and 1700’s. Bernoulli outlined a theory of gasses known as the “billiard ball” model. In this model, a gas is described as a large number of very small molecules bouncing off each other. This can be imagined a bunch of billiard balls hitting each other, except a gas does this…
