Unit 9: Change and Chance

This Nuffield Advanced Physics Unit was presented as a single volume for teachers and students. The aim was to make the ideas behind the Second Law of Thermodynamics intelligible to students at school. The approach was through the statistics of molecular chaos, because the authors felt that this was the best way to provided a first insight into what entropy 'is', and also because they took the view that the growing importance of statistical thinking in physics, chemistry, and in biology, made it especially desirable to provide opportunities for students to think about the difficult concepts involved. In addition, much that was new and powerful in the Unit could be shown to emerge from a very few fundamental ideas: given quanta and atoms, one emerges with the Boltzmann factor, Kelvin temperature, entropy, and the Second Law.

Contents
*Introduction
Part One One-way processes
Part Two The fuel resources of the Earth
Part Three Chance and diffusion
Part Four Thermal equilibrium, temperature, and chance
Part Five Counting ways
Part Six Uses of thermodynamic ideas
*Answers
*Appendices
A Heat, work, the conservation of energy, and the First Law of Thermodynamics
B The Einstein model and the Kelvin temperature
C The quantum shuffling game for indistinguishable quanta
D Photographs of pucks distributed between two halves of a surface
Lists of books, films and film loops, slides, and apparatus