Saturday, October 2, 2010

Illustrating energy states


Here is a screencast showing 2 simulations I made to illustrate energy states (often also called microstates).  Open any book on statistical mechanics and you'll see a formula like this (for the Boltzmann distribution),
and, perhaps, a figure much like this.
But what are these "energy states" and ε's exactly? Hopefully the screencast and associated simulations, which you can find here and here, will help make this clearer.

About the simulations
If you want to play around with the HCl simulation, note that you have to reload the page if you want to change the translational motion.  This simulation is made with Jmol.  The molecular dynamics simulation of butane is made with Molecular Workbench.

3 comments:

Bryan Sanctuary said...

One thing I like about the video is it shows that particles, molecules, cannot be distinguished one from the other. This is a fundamental property of the microscopic that does not exist in our macroscopic world. It leads to bosons, fermions and even anyons. I talk a lot about this on my blog:
http://quantummechanics.mchmultimedia.com/

Anonymous said...

Sir, the energy states are changing rapidly every second, which means an infinitesimal amount of the substance under examination can have innumerable states. How on earth can we ever model/use this in reality for anything?

I simply dazzled.

Thanks for great work on the animation, although i do not know much in this area of science but your animation is simply remarkable.

Unknown said...

Thanks for your work, I think actually this will help me to understand, like some basic knowledge from biology, physics chemistry insight.

On the other hand, this animation is very positive to examine and understanding to the biochemist's methods.