Description
What forces drive atoms and molecules to bind, to adsorb, to dissolve, to permeatemembranes, to undergo chemical reactions, and to undergo conformational changes? This is a textbook on statistical thermodynamics. It describes the forces that govern molecular behavior. Statistical thermodynamics uses physical models, mathematical approximations, and empirical laws that are rooted in the language of entropy, distribution function, energy, heat capacity, free energy, and partition function, to predict the behaviors of molecules in physical, chemical, and biological systems.
This text is intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates in physical chemistry, biochemistry, biophysics, bioengineering, polymer and materials science, pharmaceutical chemistry, chemical engineering, and environmental science.
We had three goals in mind as we wrote this book. First, we tried to make extensive connections with experiments and familiar contexts, to show the practical importance of this subject. We have included many applications in biology and polymer science, in addition to applications in more traditional areas of chemistry and physics. Second, we tried to make this book accessible to students with a variety of backgrounds. So, for example, we have included material on probabilities, approximations, partial derivatives, vector calculus, and the historical basis of thermodynamics. Third, we strove to find a vantage point from which the concepts are revealed in their simplest and most comprehensible forms. For this reason, we follow the axiomatic approach to thermodynamics developed by HB Callen, rather than the more traditional inductive approach; and the Maximum Entropy approach of Jaynes, Skilling, and Livesay, in preference to the Gibbs ensemble method. We have drawn from many excellent texts, particularly those by Callen, Hill, Atkins, Chandler, Kubo, Kittel & Kroemer, Carrington, Adkins, Weiss, Doi, Flory, and Berry, Rice, & Ross. Our focus here is on molecular driving forces, which overlaps with—but is not identical to—the subject of thermodynamics. While the power of thermodynamics is its generality, the power of statistical thermodynamics is the insight it gives into microscopic interactions through the enterprise of model-making. A central theme of this book is that making models, even very simple ones, is a route to insight and to understanding how molecules work. A good theory, no matter how complex its mathematics, is usually rooted in some very simple physical idea.
Models are mental toys to guide our thinking. The most important ingredients in a good model are predictive power and insight into the causes of the predicted behavior. The more rigorous a model, the less room for ambiguity. But models don’t need to be complicated to be useful. Many of the key insights in statistical mechanics have come from simplifications that may seem unrealistic at first glance: particles represented as perfect spheres with atomic detail left out, neglecting the presence of other particles, using crystal-like lattices of particles in liquids and polymers, and modeling polymer chains as random flights, etc. To borrow a quote, statistical thermodynamics has a history of what might be called the unreasonable effectiveness of unrealistic simplifications. Perhaps the classic example is the two-dimensional Ising model of magnets as two types of arrows, up spins or down spins, on square lattices. Lars Onsager’s famous solution to this highly simplified model was a major contribution to the modern revolution in our understanding of phase transitions and critical phenomena.