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Published by
World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
P O Box 128, Farrer Road, Singapore 912805
USA office: Suite 1B, 1060 Main Street, River Edge, NJ 07661
UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Amit, D. J., 1938–
Statistical physics : an introductory course / Daniel J. Amit, Yosef Verbin; translated
from the Hebrew by Rarni Tzafriri.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 981023192X -- ISBN 9810234767 (sc)
1. Statistical physics. I. Verbin, Yosef. II. Title.
1999
--dc21 99-057215
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
First published in Hebrew in 1995 by The Open University of Israel.
Copyright © 1999 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known
or to be invented, without written permission from the Publisher.
For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance Center,
Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy is not required from
the publisher.
Printed in Singapore.
Contents
Preface xi
Part I The ic Theory of Gases 1
Introduction 3
Chapter 1 Velocity and Position Distributions of Molecules in a Gas 6
Avogadro’s law, or the equation of state of an ideal gas
Temperature and thermal equilibrium 9
Equipartition of energy per molecule and its constituent
parts — a fundamental problem 13
The density in an isothermal atmosphere — the Boltzmann
factor in the potential energy 20
The Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution 24
Averages and distributions 28
Chapter 2 Brownian Motion 32
Historical