Statistical Thermodynamics. Course of Seminar Lectures. Delivered in January - March 1944, at the School of Theoretical Physics, 1944 [SCARCE HECTOGRAPHIC PRINTING OF SCHRODINGER'S SEMINAR LECTURES]

Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1944. 1st Edition. 1944 FIRST EDITION. SCARCE PRE-PUBLICATION OF SCHRODINGER'S SEMINAR LECTURES. HECTOGRAPHED TYPESCRIPT housed in a custom case. Signed copy of the physicist, C.E. Easthope. OCLC cites only a handful of these specific printings: "very small edition of the lectures was published in hectograph form by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies" (University of St. Andrews). A hectograph was an early apparatus for copying documents. While this specific print-run is unknown, in similar cases it is usually under 30 copies.

"From January to March 1944 Schrodinger returned to one of his first loves in science in a course of lectures on Statistical Thermodynamics. They were published in a small hectographed edition... In [this work] he covered the fundamentals of the subject with an insight and clarity that have never been equaled. The book is a distillation of his many years of creative work in the field" (Moore, Schrodinger, 415).

"The object of this seminar [was] 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..." (From the General Introduction by Schrodinger, f. 1).

Schrodinger argues that this "is the mathematical problem" and that it is "always the same" (ibid). He further states "There are two ways to think about it but there are two different attitudes as regards the physical application of the mathematical result" (ibid). Schrodinger assesses both Gibbs's and Boltzmann's methodology - the two different attitudes to which he refers and "It is in the course of the present lectures that Schrodinger explains why he thought the Boltzmann counting method not be appropriate. Furthermore, Schrodinger here distinguishes himself from his 1925-6 publications on the same subject by presenting (1) the complete relinquishment of the concept of wave packets, and (2) the exclusive stress put on the field quantization formalism which, for all statistical purposes, is equivalent to Schrödinger's initial quantized matter wave model" (ibid).

"Between 1940 and 1956, Schrodinger was senior professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Study's School of Theoretical Physics, during which his tenure there became famous as a gathering-place for discussion of current problems in physics" (Jeremy Norman). CONDITION & DETAILS: Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1944. Hectographed typescript in custom brown case with a brown, gilt-lettered label at the spine. Complete. 4to. 251 x 201mm. [2], 135ff. Original stiff wrappers, cloth spine with light scuffing and creasing. Very good + copy with former owner's signature on the title page ("C. E. Easthope." Charles Emmanuel Easthope, "is best known for developing the full theory of radiation from electrons travelling at close to the speed of light" (Wikipedia).