Physics 4230 Course Syllabus

Spring 2003

Physics 4230, Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics, is a Junior/Senior level course in thermal physics. We will cover thermodynamics, including energy, entropy, heat engines, free energy, and phase transitions, and statistical mechanics, including both classical and quantum statistics. The course is taught with three lectures per week. There are weekly problem sets and office hours. We will have two in-class midterms and a final exam.

Students in Physics 4230 should already have taken General Physics 1, 2, and 3, or similar courses at the Freshmen/Sophomore level. A Junior level course in mechanics (PHYS 3210) would be helpful but is not essential.

Thermal physics is one of the most powerful, deep, and reliable areas of knowledge in the physics sciences. It concerns any system with many degrees of freedom, which includes virtually anything of macroscopic size or larger that is made of atoms, but also much smaller systems if the energy is high enough for subatomic degrees of freedom to be active. Entropy, a quantitative measure of disorder (or number of accessible microstates) is the most basic concept in this subject, and it has a good claim for being one of the deepest ideas in all of physics. The ideas of thermal physics are incredibly general. The concepts we will study apply equally to the Universe one millisecond after the Big Bang, nuclear fusion reactions in stars, cooking an egg on a gas stove, annealing steel, internal combustion engines, solar power conversion, energy efficiency of buildings, electrons in semiconductors and superconductors, and Bose-Einstein condensation in atomic vapors.

We will cover the subject both from a purely macroscopic perspecitive (thermodynamics) and by averaging over microscopic degrees of freedom (statistical mechanics). Thermodynamics is extremely general and reliable, but we need the statistical approach to take advantage of what we know about the microstructure of the system (usually at the atomic scale).

Your course grade is determined by a combination of your performance on exams and problem sets.

Exams are scheduled as above. The midterms are in-class and will be worth 250 points each. The final will be worth 500 points. Solutions to the exams will be posted on the web site.

The text we will use is "An Introduction to Thermal Physics," by Daniel Schroeder. Always read sections of the text before we cover them in class. If you do, you’ll get much more out of the lectures. We will cover the entire book except for sections 4.4, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, and all of Chapter 8. After the course, you will be able to read and understand on your own the parts we skipped.

There will be 14 weekly problem sets, worth 100 points each. This is the most important part of the course. Most students benefit from working problems in a group and you are encouraged to do this. However, it is very important to solve and understand every problem yourself. Use help from others only when you get stuck. Limit yourself to verbal help; do not take any written information from others and do not make written notes when you talk to others. This will ensure that you think things through independently after you get help. If you are doing well on homework and poorly on exams, you are probably getting too much help.

No late homeworks will be accepted. If something happens that makes it impossible for you to complete a homework, we will excuse you from that assignment. Be sure that you go back and work the problems as soon as you can.

Graduate Student Yongfeng Guan will be grading your homework. Questions about homework grading should be addressed to him. Solutions to the homeworks will be posted on the web site.

The web site for Physics 4230 provides information on all course activities. You must check the web site regularly.

The schedule of office hours will be announced later. In general, Professor Price's office hours are for physics questions, and Yongfeng Guan office hours are for questions about homework grading.

The topics that we will cover in Physics 4230 are among the greatest intellectual achievements of humans. Don’t be surprised if you have to think hard and work hard to understand the material. You can perform very well in this class if you follow this time-tested system:

1. Read the text section before lecture. If you read it first, it’ll sink in faster during lecture.
2. Take notes on your reading and try to write down questions you have so you can ask them in class.
3. Come to class and stay involved. Come to office hours with questions.
4. Start the homework early. Give yourself the time to work and understand. No one is smart enough to do the homework in the last hour before class, and no one is smart enough to learn the material without working problems.
5. Work together. You need to do your own thinking, but talking to others is a great way to get unstuck.
6. Don’t get behind. It’s very hard to catch up.