Lectures Notes: Pages 1a--39b

I have posted pages 1a-20b and 21a-39b on the course website. I'll estimate that there will be somewhere between 54 and 60 pages in total (so twice that many sides), with around 54 being more likely than around 60.

It will be a while before I post the remaining lecture notes (which I need to finish preparing) and homework sheets.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, I am following Jim Sethna's book (freely available online) closely. Thus far, I am following it---though with some small differences based on whether I agree with what is written or want to change or add perspective on certain details---except a small unit on "nonequilibrium statistical mechanics" in which I gave an introduction to kinetic theory (this topic isn't covered in Sethna). There are, of course, numerous other topics in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics---it is a huge subject---and some of them show up briefly in other parts of the lecture notes, though in those cases there are discussions (for the notes I have prepared thus far) in Sethna's book.

A Useful Online Resource

For the first part of this module, I will be drawing most of the material in the lecture notes from Jim Sethna's textbook, which is available for free online. (I will add some extra comments and on occasion disagree with a couple of the things in Sethna's book.) Sethna's book contains more details than I will give, and it should be very helpful.