Statistical Mechanics: Entropy, Order Parameters, and Complexity (Oxford Master Series in Physics) 2nd Edition by James P. Sethna (PDF)

Description

Statistical mechanics is our tool for deriving the laws that emerge from complex systems. Sethna’s text distills the subject to be accessible to those in all realms of science and engineering — avoiding extensive use of quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and molecular physics. Statistical mechanics explains how bacteria search for food, and how DNA replication is proof-read in biology; optimizes data compression, and explains transitions in complexity in computer science; explains the onset of chaos, and launched random matrix theory in mathematics; addresses extreme events in engineering; and models pandemics and language usage in the social sciences. Sethna’s exercises introduce physicists to these triumphs and a hundred others — broadening the horizons of scholars both practicing and nascent. Flipped classrooms and remote learning can now rely on 33 pre-class exercises that test reading comprehension (Emergent vs. fundamental; Weirdness in high dimensions; Aging, entropyand DNA), and 70 in-class activities that illuminate and broaden knowledge (Card shuffling; Human correlations; Crackling noises). Science is awash in information, providing ready access to definitions, explanations, and pedagogy. Sethna’s text focuses on the tools we use to create new laws, and on the fascinating simple behavior in complex systems that statistical mechanics explains.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author James P. Sethna, Professor of Physics, Cornell UniversityJames P. Sethna is professor of physics at Cornell University. Sethna has used statistical mechanics to make substantive contributions in a bewildering variety of subjects — mathematics (dynamical systems and the onset of chaos), engineering (microstructure, plasticity, and fracture), statistics (information geometry, sloppy models, low-dimensional embeddings), materials science (glasses and spin glasses, liquid crystals, crackling noise, superconductivity), and popular culture (mosh pit dynamics and zombie outbreak epidemiology). He has collected cool, illustrative problems from students and colleagues over the decades, which inspired this textbook.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I share the same complaint as other reviewers, one of them wrote: “…but this book is terrible if you have to complete the exercises. The exercises are often as long as the entire chapter, each of which is *far* too short. Beyond this, the short chapters do nothing but introduce the the most obvious of examples/concepts. That would be fine, if it were not coupled with the fact that the exercises are either the most outlandish applications of ideas that you have hardly been introduced to, or they require absurd assumptions that one simply will not arrive at given the information in the chapter.” There are other more helpful textbooks.Overall, this book would not be a good textbook for undergraduate or even graduate students, but it can be a useful reference book for people already learned something about statistical mechanics.

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