One is Better Than None

I turned in the second (and last!) exam for my stat mech course yesterday morning. Unfortunately, I still have an assignment to do in that class, and no motivation to go with it. At this point in time, I’m just hoping for fifty out of one hundred points on this exam. Taking the exam was a brilliant lesson in why I despise stat mech. I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to start the second problem (of three) which is worth fifty of the hundred points (part of the reason I’m not expecting to do much better than a 50….). My problem? Figuring out to get started. I spent hours, spilling over into days (it was a 9 day take home…), trying to start the problem by writing down the partition function. The partition function is this magic piece of information that essentially lets you figure out any thermodynamic property of the system you might be interested in (energy, entropy, etc.) once you know it. What makes life unbelievably difficult is that writing down these functions is not trivial, especially in cases like this where you have interactions – the energy of one particle affects the energy of a neighbor. Let’s just say I’m pretty sure I didn’t get the correct function, which means everything I did for all three parts of the problem is incorrect. Not exactly the greatest feeling in the world. This is also why stat mech is much more evil than Jackson E&M – at least I can start those problems (and then get stuck with integrals, Bessel functions, Green’s functions, etc.).