I enjoyed reading this post quite a bit, but the exact reason why eludes me. I think I’ve had or almost had a lot of these thoughts before, and this post clarified them for me.
I have a tendency to be constantly asking something like “but what is the real thing going on?”. This is obviously very useful overall, but as in the post, it is sometimes also to useful to say “within this context, let’s only reason as if this is all that’s going on” and then try to improve my understanding of something that way. I think this would have significantly improved my experience of learning thermo and stat mech.
For anyone who’s interested in going deeper on a formalism of thermo with no stat mech, I once found this niche book that seems to do exactly that: A First Course in the Mathematical Foundations of Thermodynamics. (It’s published by Springer so it’s probably legit, but I didn’t actually get that far into it, so this isn’t a recommendation per se.)
I enjoyed reading this post quite a bit, but the exact reason why eludes me. I think I’ve had or almost had a lot of these thoughts before, and this post clarified them for me.
I have a tendency to be constantly asking something like “but what is the real thing going on?”. This is obviously very useful overall, but as in the post, it is sometimes also to useful to say “within this context, let’s only reason as if this is all that’s going on” and then try to improve my understanding of something that way. I think this would have significantly improved my experience of learning thermo and stat mech.
For anyone who’s interested in going deeper on a formalism of thermo with no stat mech, I once found this niche book that seems to do exactly that: A First Course in the Mathematical Foundations of Thermodynamics. (It’s published by Springer so it’s probably legit, but I didn’t actually get that far into it, so this isn’t a recommendation per se.)