By Stephen G. Brush
This paintings is a ancient account of theories of the houses of subject, beginning with the tips of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton approximately fuel constitution and carrying on with to the paintings of L. D. Landau and Lars Onsager. Describing the kinetic theories of gases proposed through Daniel Bernoulli (1738) and by means of quite a few nineteenth-century scientists and the debates on irreversibility and randomness in atomic movement, Stephen G. Brush additionally discusses the transition from those principles to quantum theory.
The significant a part of the booklet bargains with twentieth-century theories, dependent partly on quantum mechanics, utilized to the superftuidity of liquid helium, subject in stars, interatomic forces, and the chemical bond.
The writer incorporates a significant bankruptcy at the conception of section transitions and important phenomena. He additionally considers philosophical questions bobbing up from the advance of statistical mechanics, e.g., the difficulty of "reduction" of a macroscopic thought to a microscopic one. The final bankruptcy surveys a few amazing present difficulties within the field.
While old in technique, the e-book is meant for readers with a few wisdom of theoretical physics. lots of the fabric at the improvement of statistical mechanics when you consider that 1900 isn't on hand in the other systematic survey.
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Extra resources for Statistical Physics and the Atomic Theory of Matter from Boyle and Newton to Landau and Onsager
Example text
To understand how energy and the kinetic worldview got into physics in the first half of the 19th century, we must first grant that scientists in this period had a strong desire to unify their theories of different phenomena and were fascinated by experiments showing the interrelations of diverse forces in nature. The desire for unity may originally have been associated, as has been suggested by Kuhn (1959) and others, with Romantic nature philosophy and its postulate that all phenomena are manifestations of a single underlying force or an antagonism of two opposing forces in an organismic universe.
Whether the matter is fluid, has weight, is composed of discrete particles, etc. are subsidiary problems that can be worked out once the primary issue of substance versus quality has been settled. 16 At the beginning of the 19th century it was widely accepted, in part on Newton's authority, that light is a substance-in particular, a stream of particles. Thomas Young failed to change this situation, either by performing his famous two-slit interference experiment or by quoting statements of Newton in favor of a wave theory.
That was the suggestion of Roger Boscovich (1758), and it has often been adopted by scientists in the last 200 years. Both solutions have disadvantages. In Huygens' theory one has to abandon any definite description of a force acting between two atoms when they collide. In Boscovich's theory the tangible atom is replaced by a system of forces, and it is difficult to see how a mathematical point can have all the properties we attribute to atoms. These difficulties in finding a consistent and plausible model of the atom did not prevent scientists from accepting Newton's theory of gas pressure.