Thermodynamics

Hoorah! Professor Luscombe has done a wonderful service to graduate students and younger physicists who find themselves clueless when they encounter a subtlety of thermodynamics because their undergraduate course in Thermal Physics raced through thermodynamics to get to statistical mechanics. -Prof. Andrew Zangwill, Georgia Institue of Technology The subject of thermodynamics is a difficult topic to grasp even by those who use it frequently. This upper-level treatment, Thermodynamics, helps fill in the details that many introductory textbooks do not, and should not, provide. Oftentimes in this subject, as students especially, one is required to press the I believe button in order to avoid a lengthy and scattered search required for piecing together the fundamental question in physics, Why? , regarding the thermodynamic question at hand. This book, on the contrary, compiles many of those answers together in a step-by-step fashion and explains them in modern vernacular. While by no means is this a complete description of thermodynamics, nor does it claim to be, it provides a theoretical background and framework from which thermodynamics originates. For anyone looking to find a textbook that will fill in the gaps of prior teachings and provide the tools for understanding the fundamentals of thermodynamics, this textbook is a phenomenal resource to have available. -Blake McCracken, Experimental Physicist Luscombe's Thermodynamics is an exciting addition to the field. The first thing you notice when opening the book is the engaging writing style. This is a textbook that does not read like a textbook. It makes you feel that the author is speaking with you directly, either one-to-one or in a small seminar. The structure of the book is sound. Its approach is to give equal weight and importance to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, or put another way, to the macrosco