Talk:Statistical physics

message: First I think that the exact content of the text about "statistical physics" is not very important because how ever you formulate it - it would result in rather vague texts. This may be because all questions put forward (such as this one - what is staistical physics ?) by the investigating human beings are not optimised to get clear cut answers.
When that is the case you would get a more consice and meaningful text if you stick to very simple statements about nature, and make a text about them, letting the reader know that you are talking about a vaguely defined term.
For instance,
In nature occurs phenomena such that we may describe as "statistical" either due to the appearance and interactions of many objects in a physical system, or due to quantum mechanical effects...
Then build up a popularized text according to this. Then you may possibly add a discussion of why subjects like "econophysics" and similar have more in common with statistical physics compared to theories of neural networks. Do they?
Regards Erik Eneroth, Askersund!  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.70.146.164 (talk) 18:46, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  speak in natures own words when discussing - not to become vague 

message: # This "statistical physics" page is simply not useful as it stands. The bulk of the discussion concerns "statistical mechanics", which has its own page - why duplicate here?
# The current box urges translation from French, and in the French wikipedia there is NO "statistical mechanics" page ("mécanique statistique") only the linked statistical physics page, which is largely about only EQUILIBRIUM statistical mechanics.
# The French page links to a separate discussion of non-equilibrium statistical physics, which sounds like a good idea to me; the techniques for handling non-equilibrium are very different.
# I taught statistical physics/mechanics 25 year ago as a grad student; in my experience the term "statistical mechanics" has never meant just applying statistical concerns to mechanical systems, but covers every application of the statistical many-body problem.
# The ONLY thing that occurs to me as might be covered by "statistical physics" but not by "statistical mechanics" as the term is commonly used is the more traditional application of statistics in analysis of observations, where the number of instances N is closer to 1 than to Avogadro's number. That subject is covered just fine by pages like statistical hypothesis testing so if we really want a "statistical physics" page maybe it should be limited to a disambiguation page between that (and any other similarly appropriate pages) and statistical mechanics.
Anyway, I strongly advocate eliminating this page in favor of the "statistical mechanics" page with either a redirect or a disambiguation replacing this. ArthurPSmith (talk) 20:44, 31 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Strongly advocate merging with statistical mechanics 

message: Sorry, been away for a while; but don't worry, here's a warm up to my view ... 
Thermal qft, quantum stat mech and stat field theory: 
#are they the same, and if not what's the difference? Ema--or (talk) 03:48, 28 January 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: queries

message: statistical dynamics, statistical electrodynamics, statistical dynamics (again)
Ema--or (talk) 02:50, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Possible branches of stat phys

message: I removed the template recommending that content from the french fr:Physique statistique should be moved here.  As evidenced by this talk page, there's a lot of debate and uncertainty about statistical physics vs statistical mechanics and how to organize this.  The french version is different:  there is only one article, fr:Physique statistique, and it's about (equilibrium) statistical mechanics. Since they don't directly correspond and where the content goes is still very debatable, a translator should not blindly move content from the French article to this page. Cyrej (talk) 12:28, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: translation template