Publisher's Synopsis
Directed at physicists interested in the foundations of statistical mechanics, this book deals with questions about the origins and evolution of entropy and the "arrow of time". Proofs of many important theorums are included as well as new material on, for example, the demonstration that the black body radiation law can be deduced from maximal entropy principles, the addition of sufficient conditions for the existence of at least one state of thermodynamic equilibrium, a fuller description of the behaviour of entropy in asymptotically periodic systems, the use of the Koopman and Frobenius Perron operators for deriving the evolution equation for densities under the action of a continuous time dynamical system described by a system of ODEs; and a presentation of the three main types of ergodic theorums and their proofs.
