Statistical Thermodynamics

THE RARE FIRST PRINTING
IMPORTANT LECTURES ON THEORETICAL PHYSICS
first edition 4to. [2 (title & contents)], 136 leaves hectographed on rectos only, typescript with the mathematical formulae, symbols, &c. inserted into the original typescript in hand-writing, original black cloth-backed stiff orange wrappers, front cover lettered in black, slight water mark near foot of front wrapper with a corresponding spot of orange dye on to the following 2 leaves, title slightly foxed, very good. Rare.

The scarce first publication in typescript form of Schrödinger's important attempt to develop a simple, unified standard method of dealing with all cases of statistical thermodynamics which he expounded in his seminar lectures of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. In this form the lectures were published in a very small edition. The lectures were republished in 1946 in a slightly revised form in a public edition under the same title."The idea of this seminar is to develop briefly one simple, unified standard method, capable of dealing, without changing the fundamental attitude, with all cases (classical, quantum, Bose-Einstein, Fermi-Dirac, etc.) and with every new problem that may turn up. The interest is focused on the general procedure, and examples are dealt with as illustrations thereof. Not a first introduction for new-comers to the subject is intended, rather a 'repetitorium'. The wording is extremely shortened about well-known stories to be found in every one of a hundred text-books, but more extended on some vital points, usually passed over in all but large monographs (as Fowler's and Tolman's). There is, essentially, only one problem in statistical thermodynamics: the distribution of a given amount of energy E over N identical systems. Or perhaps better: to determine the distribution of an assembly of N identical systems over the possible states in which this assembly can find itself, given that the energy of the system is a constant E" [Schroedinger in his General Introduction].
Schroedinger (1887 1961) had been awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1933 in conjunction with Dirac for their development of quantum mechanics. Nazi policy led to him leaving his native Austria in that same year and in 1939 he came to the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, newly founded by Eamon De Valera who had himself been a mathematician before becoming a politician. He was to remain in Ireland until 1956.