Introduction

Abstract

The way that most of us learned physics involved first acquiring the mathematical language and methods that are used to describe physics and then learning to calculate the motions of particles and fields, first using classical physics and then later quantum mechanics. Now we want to apply what we have learned to problems involving many degrees of freedom—solids, liquids, gases,  polymers, plasmas,  stars, galaxies and interstellar matter, nuclei, and a complex world of subnuclear particles and fields. Statistical mechanics provides a bridge between the dynamics of particles and their collective behavior. It is basically the study of the properties of interacting many-body systems which have in common the fact that they involve very large numbers of degrees of freedom.