Daniel Schroeder | Introduction to Thermal Physics

Daniel Schroeder is a particle and accelerator physicist and an editor for The American Journal of Physics. Dan received his PhD from Stanford University, where he spent most of his time at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, and he is currently a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Weber State University. Dan is also the author of two revered physics textbooks, the first with Michael Peskin called An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory (or simply Peskin & Schroeder within the physics community) and the second An Introduction to Thermal Physics. Dan enjoys teaching physics courses at all levels, from Elementary Astronomy through Quantum Mechanics. In this episode, I get to connect with one of my teachers, having taken both thermodynamics and quantum field theory courses when I was a university student based on Dan's textbooks. We take a deep dive towards answering two fundamental questions in the subject of thermodynamics: what is temperature and what is entropy? We provide both a qualitative and quantitative analysis, discussing good and bad definitions of temperature, microstates and macrostates, the second law of thermodynamics, and the relationship between temperature and entropy. Our discussion was also a great chance to shed light on some of the philosophical assumptions and conundrums in thermodynamics that do not typically come up in a physics course: the fundamental assumption of statistical mechanics, Laplace's demon, and the arrow of time problem (Loschmidt's paradox) arising from the second law of thermodynamics (i.e. why is entropy increasing in the future when mechanics has time-reversal symmetry). Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/timothynguyen Outline: 00:00:00 : Introduction 00:01:54 : Writing Books 00:06:51 : Academic Track: Research vs Teaching 00:11:01 : Charming Book Snippets 00:14:54 : Discussion Plan: Two Basic Questions 00:17:19 : Temperature is What You Measure with a Thermometer 00:22:50 : Bad definition of Temperature: Measure of Average Kinetic Energy 00:25:17 : Equipartition Theorem 00:26:10 : Relaxation Time 00:27:55 : Entropy from Statistical Mechanics 00:30:12 : Einstein solid 00:32:43 : Microstates + Example Computation 00:38:33: Fundamental Assumption of Statistical Mechanics (FASM) 00:46:29 : Multiplicity is highly concentrated about its peak 00:49:50 : Entropy is Log(Multiplicity) 00:52:02 : The Second Law of Thermodynamics 00:56:13 : FASM based on our ignorance? 00:57:37 : Quantum Mechanics and Discretization 00:58:30 : More general mathematical notions of entropy 01:02:52 : Unscrambling an Egg and The Second Law of Thermodynamics 01:06:49 : Principle of Detailed Balance 01:09:52 : How important is FASM? 01:12:03 : Laplace's Demon 01:13:35 : The Arrow of Time (Loschmidt's Paradox) 01:15:20 : Comments on Resolution of Arrow of Time Problem 01:16:07 : Temperature revisited: The actual definition in terms of entropy 01:25:24 : Historical comments: Clausius, Boltzmann, Carnot 01:29:07 : Final Thoughts: Learning Thermodynamics   Further Reading: Daniel Schroeder. An Introduction to Thermal Physics L. Landau & E. Lifschitz. Statistical Physics.   Twitter: @iamtimnguyen Webpage: http://www.timothynguyen.org