PHYS358 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Paramagnetism, Xband, Gas Constant
20 Nov 2017
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Document Summary
State variables, equations of state and the laws of thermodynamics. It began with the observation that aggregated matter can exist in equilibrium states which have very well de ned macroscopic properties. Thermodynamics has been able to describe, with remarkable accuracy, the macroscopic behavior of a huge variety of systems over the entire range of experimentally accessible temperatures from 10 9 k to 107 k). It provides a universal theory of matter in the aggregate. And yet, the entire subject is based on only four laws, which may be stated rather simply as we will see. One of the most amazing aspects of thermodynamics is that it describes the behaviour of systems with an extremely large number of degrees of freedom (typically. 1023) in chaotic motion in terms of only a few parameters. The elements of the set of parameters that allow us to fully characterize the thermodynamical state of a system are called state variables.
