Statistical mechanics provides the framework for deriving macroscopic thermodynamic properties from the microscopic characteristics of matter. Central to this discipline is the concept of entropy, ...

Black holes are intriguing astronomical objects that have a gravitational pull so strong that it prevents any object and even light from escaping. While black holes have been the topic of numerous ...

A challenge in materials design is that in both natural and humanmade materials, volume sometimes decreases, or increases, with increasing temperature. While there are mechanical explanations for this ...

A challenge in materials design is that in both natural and manmade materials, volume sometimes decreases, or increases, with increasing temperature. While there are mechanical explanations for this ...

What Boltzmann showed was that entropy is a measure of how many different ways a system can be arranged without changing its macrostate. The higher the entropy, the more microstates there are that ...

In the 1960s, the physicist E.T. Jaynes showed that Boltzmann’s entropy is not just a measure of disorder or the number of microstates that correspond to a particular macrostate. Entropy is also a ...