Thermostatics

Abstract

Thermostatistical physics was developed to describe properties of matter in bulk. In this study we distinguish three levels. Note that we write distinguish not separate: we will have many occasions to explore the passages between these levels, and we do not want to let ourselves be confined within any particular level. Yet, we must start somewhere, even though we anticipate some traveling back and forth, treading over old roads with new shoes. Succinctly, these three levels are: the gathering of data and/or information and their presentation in ways that are recognizable enough to participate in the second level, namely theory building, while the results obtained at both of these levels are to be formulated in a manner that is verifiable/falsifiable enough to allow, at the third level, their being tested and evaluated. The dynamics and organization of this book is provided by our efforts to show how models thus arise as scaffoldings erected by scientists to organize their judgments at all three of these levels. In doing so we are often confronted with questions of consistency, either within individual fields of research or across diverse contexts. A superficial commentator might be tempted to advance that some — or even much of — pure mathematics is established in a “context-free” manner; we argue, in contrast to this caricatural view, that much of the appeal and integrity of the sciences, of which thermo-physics is a particularly instructive representative, depends on the fact that their practitioners have to take into account the necessity of traveling back and forth between different “contexts”.

Les causes primordiales ne nous sont point connues mais elles sont assujetties à des lois simples et constantes que l’on peut découvrir par l’observation et dont l’étude est l’objet de la Philosophie naturelle.

[Fourier, 1822]