A Historical Overview of Statistical Physics: From Democritus to Quantum Phase Transitions, Study notes of Thermal Physics

Download A Historical Overview of Statistical Physics: From Democritus to Quantum Phase Transitions and more Study notes Thermal Physics in PDF only on Docsity! A Brief Outline of the History of Statistical Physics From notes by N. D. Goldenfeld and D. M. Ginsberg 400 BCE Democritus hypothesizes that all matter is made up of small, rapidly moving particles, separated by empty space. 1658 CE Gassendi recognizes that the particles making up a gas are widely separated from each other, compared to the particle size. 1662 Boyle's law of gases (PV = constant if temperature is held constant) 1738 Daniel Bernoulli derives the relation between the pressure exerted by a gas and the mean square speed of the gas's molecules. 1800 Davy uses atomic theory to explain the law that chemical combination involves simple proportions (ratios of small integers). 1822 Fourier's theory of heat conduction 1822 delaTour discovers the critical point 1824 Carnot's theory of the efficiency of the heat engine 1840 First law of thermodynamics (Mayer, Joule, Helmholtz, etc.) 1848 Absolute temperature defined by William Thomson - later named Lord Kelvin 1850 Second law of thermodynamics formulated by Clausius 1854 Importance of entropy (defined thermodynamically) realized by Clausius (but it wasn't called "entropy" until 1865) 1860 Maxwell distribution of molecular velocities and equipartition theorem 1868 Boltzmann extends Maxwell's theory to a gas in a force field 1873 Van der Waals equation for the nonideal gas 1877 Boltzmann gives the statistical interpretation of entropy 1893 Van der Waals theory of the critical point 1900 Planck derives the energy distribution law for black-body radiation 1902 Gibbs publishes the Elementary Principles of Statistical Mechanics 1905 Einstein's paper on Brownian motion 1907 Einstein's paper on the specific heat of the atomic vibrations in solids 1908 Perrin's experiments on Brownian motion 1911 Perrin experimentally confirms Einstein's predictions on sedimentation, showing that atoms exist (for those who still doubted it) 1914 Nernst proposes the third law of thermodynamics 1917 Einstein discovers spontaneous emission 1925 Bose-Einstein statistics and condensation 1926 Fermi-Dirac statistics 1927 Pauli and Sommerfeld initiate the free-electron theory of metals 1933 Ehrenfest classifies phase transitions 1937 Landau theory of phase transitions. 1944 Onsager solves the two-dimensional Ising model of magnetism 1957 Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory of superconductivity 1966 Widom and Kadanoff discover scaling at second-order phase transitions 1970 Development of the renormalization group by Wilson 2000 Quantum Phase Transitions 2008 You take Thermal Physics at the University of Illinois.