Talk:Microstate (statistical mechanics)

message: The internal energy is the mean of the system's energy
 
This definition is the traduction of the first law of thermodynamics
Traduction gives me problems, my dictionary gives the root meaning as traduce - to misrepresent, speak ill of. Can someone clarify/correct this please?--Damorbel 10:06, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Internal energy

message: In the article, it looks like, the term macrostate has been identified with a thermodynamic state specified by 
thermodynamic variables like temperature, pressure etc.  
However, in statistical mechanics,  the term macrostate is most often used to refer to a state with specific  Energy, Number 
of particles and Volume.  This is not really a thermodynamic state. Thermodynamic variables are averages  over several
microstates with appropriate Boltzmann weight determined by the particular macrostate they belong to.  In this sense the article
needs a revamp in order to make it in agreement with most treatments of statistical mechanics.
Prathambhu (talk) 09:48, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Microstate and Macrostate 

message: Currently the article is occupied by a large section on "Microscopic definitions of thermodynamic concepts", however almost none of the concepts therein can be defined for a microstate. Things like entropy cannot be defined for a microstate --- they are only defined for ensembles of microstates. As far as I know, the only macroscopic quantities associated with a microstate are particle number, energy, volume, magnetization, and so on. The main point about a microstate however is that it is not only defined by macroscopic quantities, but rather defined by the position and momentum of every single particle therein. --Nanite (talk) 10:27, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  does it make sense to include thermodynamics here? 

message: "a specific microscopic configuration of a thermodynamic system" — what does this configuration include? Thank you. - 89.110.6.217 (talk) 17:31, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I actually think that it'd be right to write what it includes (maybe depending on some special cases) in the article, otherwise the definition looks mystical, as if it defines some thing in itself. - 89.110.6.217 (talk) 18:38, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Configuration 

message: For a closed system (no transfer of matter), heat in statistical mechanics is the energy transfer associated with a disordered, microscopic action on the system, associated with jumps in occupation numbers of the energy levels of the system, without change in the values of the energy levels themselves.
Isn't this true just for quantum systems? I don't know what energy levels are for classical systems.
Hmmm, that's not quite true. I can also understand energy levels for "abstract" discrete systems, such as noninteracting spins and noninteracting harmonic oscillators, defining and analyzed purely as an abstract system of energy levels without reference to quantum mechanics. 
But I know no mechanism for changing the energy levels in a classical system or the kind of "abstract" system described above. I only know about the adiabatic theorem of quantum systems, which gives some justification for identifying the energy levels of one quantum system with the energy levels of a gradually perturbed version of it. Yet this theorem requires a Hilbert space operator setup (quantum mechanics) for its proof.
ADDED: I see that the quantum/classical distinction is addressed a few lines later in the article. I put in a qualification at the start of the section so the reader is not misled. I also removed the reference to sums versus integrals and just emphasized classical limits. I hope what I wrote is accurate.
178.38.117.139 (talk) 21:27, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quantum/classical heat vs work 

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