7 System and Environment

Abstract

In a typical thermodynamic situation we consider a bipartite system with the larger part being called “environment” or “container”, c, whereas the smaller part is the observed “system” or “gas”, g. Mostly we think of a very large environment so that its energy does not change much when the system g feeds, say, energy into it during the time evolution. However, also for smaller environments we are looking for a thermal behavior of the considered system, inquiring about the constraints for such a behavior.