ThermoLab: Explore, Derive and Simulate Thermal Physics
An interactive computational textbook and virtual laboratory for university-level thermal and statistical physics — built to take you from zero to exam-ready, at the depth of a good book, with everything a computer adds: live simulations, laboratories, quizzes, exams and demonstration videos.
Everything in this course revolves around one question:
How does predictable macroscopic behaviour emerge from uncertain microscopic behaviour?
How to study here¶
Every module follows the same climb:
Opening — a physical puzzle you can feel, and a prediction you commit to before any equation.
Core — an interactive laboratory, the precise derivation, and a computational check. This is the exam-relevant spine.
Consolidation — transfer to new contexts, worked examples, quizzes and exam-style problems.
Advanced — clearly marked deeper material. Skip it freely on a first pass; nothing later depends on it.
Modules¶
The course has an orientation module, twelve core modules and six advanced modules. Currently available:
Orientation — how many unpredictable things add up to a reliable one. Start here.
Thermal equilibrium — what it means for two bodies to be “at the same temperature,” and why heat stops flowing exactly there.
Equations of state — how pressure, volume and temperature are tied together, and why real gases eventually condense.
Probability and emergence — why ten thousand aimless walkers trace a curve you can predict to three figures.
Microscopic origin of pressure — how steady pressure emerges from violent, irregular collisions.
Work and thermodynamic paths — why work depends on the road taken, not just the endpoints.
Thermodynamic processes — why a gas that expands into a vacuum does not cool, and what the slow route is worth.
The second law and heat engines — why no engine, however well built, can turn all its heat into work.
Entropy and multiplicity — why an isolated gas almost never gathers in one corner.
The fundamental relation — why two bodies in contact end at equal temperatures and not equal energies, and how one function predicts everything else.
Thermodynamic potentials — why chemists, engineers and physicists each tabulate a different “energy”, and how a pressure gauge and a thermometer measure an entropy change.
Statistical ensembles — how “every microstate is equally probable” and “high-energy states are exponentially rare” are both true, and where the Boltzmann factor comes from.
Partition functions — why the number you divide by knows a system’s energy, entropy and heat capacity, and why a negative temperature is hotter than any positive one.
Chemical potential (advanced) — why particles can pile up where they are already crowded, and what the atmosphere, an adsorbing surface and a swelling cell have in common.
Phase coexistence (advanced) — why a liquid and its vapour can share a cylinder at only one pressure, what picks that pressure, and why water boils at 71 °C on the summit of Everest.
Phase transitions and the Ising model (advanced) — why a magnet cooled through its Curie point must pick a direction its equations do not prefer, and what a simulation of a few thousand spins can and cannot prove about it.
Thermal radiation and the heat capacity of solids (advanced) — why a warm oven is not an ultraviolet lamp and a cold crystal stores almost no heat, and why “the colour at which the Sun shines brightest” has two right answers.
Quantum statistics (advanced) — why the electrons in a copper wire store almost no heat while helium atoms pile into a single quantum state, and why “quantum” is decided by density as much as by cold.
Fluctuations and transport (advanced) — why a dye molecule moving at a hundred metres per second needs a day to cross a centimetre, why thinning a gas leaves its viscosity unchanged, and how a heat capacity, and the weight of an atom, can be read off random noise.
Two reference pages sit outside the sequence and are meant to be returned to: conventions and the mathematics refresher.