Timeline for Chemical potential of particles with zero mass
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 26, 2014 at 15:58 | comment | added | Luboš Motl | What I meant was that he pioneered the framework to answer questions probabilistically - and he even realized that physics should be not about "how things are" but "what is the probability that a proposition is correct" - not necessarily assuming that a full description exists. He would also realize that the volume of the phase space would ultimately behave as a dimensionless number (in QM, an integer). But he lived before the era of quantum mechanics so of course he couldn't have found none of the actual properties of quantum mechanics in its own language. | |
| Apr 26, 2014 at 15:54 | comment | added | user7757 | (contd)..formalism later after quantum mechanics was developed? | |
| Apr 26, 2014 at 15:53 | comment | added | user7757 | @LubošMotl: Thanks for the reply. Now I understand it better. In one of your other answer you have remarked that how Boltzmann while working in classical statistical mechanics, was unknown to him using intuition from quantum statistical mechanics. Could you elaborate on how this is so? AFAIK, this is true because you can see things like indistinguishability and particle statistics from classical statistical mechanics. Is there any other such example? Also, was the semi-classical quantization (breaking the phase space into discrete parts)donecby Boltzmann,or was it added in the formalism(contd) | |
| Apr 26, 2014 at 15:12 | comment | added | Luboš Motl | Hi @ramanujan_dirac, the energy of the photon is going somewhere else, or from somewhere else, like it excites atoms, makes it decay and speed up the products, and so on, and so on. Free photons are not the only carriers of energy, are they? | |
| Apr 25, 2014 at 14:02 | comment | added | user7757 | @LubošMotl: If I consider just a photon gas, doesn't the non conservation of photon number contradict conservation of energy, as each photon has Energy$\hbar \omega$? Please could you explain why photons don't obey conservation of number? | |
| Mar 11, 2011 at 17:45 | comment | added | Luboš Motl | Obviously, this is the correct answer. Zero chemical potential $\mu$ means that its dual variable, $N$, is not conserved, so the ensemble is not allowed to punish states with different values of $N$. All the exponentials, including $\exp(-E/kT)$, in the distribution always have an exponent proportional to the conserved quantity. That's how they're derived by maximizing the number of microstates while keeping conserved quantities fixed. | |
| Mar 11, 2011 at 16:43 | vote | accept | Andy Bale | ||
| Mar 11, 2011 at 15:26 | history | answered | Ted Bunn | CC BY-SA 2.5 |