Teaching

Material for the classes of the discipline "Fundamentals of Statistical Physics" taught in the first year of the Degree in Physics and the second year of the Joint Studies Program of Degree in Physics and Degree in Mathematics at the University of Valladolid (UVa). It is a very interesting challenge to elaborate a course of such a complex discipline as Statistical Physics that, on the one hand, is simple enough at a formal level and, on the other hand, is conceptually rigorous, useful for the students and coherent with the more advanced subjects of the curriculum (in particular, with those of Thermology, namely, "Thermodynamics" and "Statistical Physics"). Although this is a difficult task, it is not impossible, thanks to the fact that the formulation of Statistical Physics based on the Maximum Entropy Principle of E.T. Jaynes (1957) does not require great knowledge of Classical or Quantum Mechanics for a first approximation. From Jaynes' point of view, the problem solved in Statistical Physics is the inference of the probabilities of the microstates (microscopic configurations) of a system from the laws of Probability Theory and a few known macroscopic constraints. The philosophy of the course is that, by understanding the conceptual reasons why this statistical inference process works, students can find all the thermodynamic information of a system from a given model of reality. In this way, the course allows students to develop a mental scheme of how Thermodynamics and Statistical Physics work and their relationship with the rest of Physics, to learn the mechanism of calculating the entropic thermodynamic potentials and to apply it to simple models whose details, at a mechanical level, they do not necessarily understand in depth.