The Space of Physical Frameworks (Part 2)

I’m trying to work out how classical statistical mechanics can reduce to thermodynamics in a certain limit. I sketched out the game plan in Part 1 but there are a lot of details to hammer out. While I’m doing this, let me stall for time by explaining more precisely what I mean by ‘thermodynamics’. Thermodynamics is a big subject, but I mean something more precise and limited in scope.

Thermostatic systems

A lot of what we call ‘thermodynamics’, or more precisely ‘classical thermodynamics’...