The lecture notes of the two courses I taught at Stanford University during the last two quarters, "ME 340 Elasticity" and "ME 334 Introduction to Statistical Mechanics", are available in PDF format online at:

  http://micro.stanford.edu/~caiwei/me340/

  http://micro.stanford.edu/~caiwei/me334/

Perhaps it could be useful to you.

Does the word "randomness" have antonym? If yes, what is it? Why? What view of randomness does that imply?

The notion of randomness is, of course, basic to both statistical mechanics (or kinetic theory) and quantum mechanics. But these are not the only fields where it is relevant. The notion also appears virtually in any field where probabilities are used. For example, we speak of random loads and vibrations (in structures and machine design), random noise (say, in acoustics), etc. But what does the term "randomness" really mean? Any idea? What would you say? Here, I am here looking for brain storming, so half-baked ideas, side comments, etc. etc. are welcome.

I am happy to recommend the following book for your general reading.

Ranganath, G.S., ``Mysterious Motions and other Intriguing Phenomena in Physics," Hyderabad, India: Universities Press (2001)

How to measure the temperature of a nanotube?

• Electric charge
• Movements of charged particles
• Elastic dielectric
• Work done by a battery and by a weight
• Electromechanical coupling
• Conservative system
• Experimental determination of electric potential
• Lagendre transformation
  
  

• A system that can exchange particles with the rest of the world
• Chemical potential
• Ideal gas
• Experimental determination of chemical potential
• Lagendre transformation
• Ideal gas once more
• Ideal solution
• Hydrogel (or poroelasticity or elastic solution)
• A system in contact with a reservoir of energy, volume and particles

Return to the outline of Statistical Mechanics

• Work done by a pressure applied to a system
• Enthalpy
• A system that changes both energy and volume
• Ideal gas
• Osmosis
• The internal energy U(S,V)
• 
  

• A small system in thermal contact with a large system
• The Boltzmann factor
• Partition function
• The probability for a system in thermal equilibrium with a reservoir to be in a specific state
• The probability for a system in thermal equilibrium with a reservoir to be in a configuration
• Thermal fluctuation of an RNA molecule
• A matter of words
  

Return to the outline of Statistical Mechanics.

• A dissection of a sample space
• Entropy of a dissection of a sample space
  
  

• Thermal contact
• Weakly interacting systems
• Hotness and temperature are synonymous
• Relative temperature scales
• Classify the configurations of a composite by the partition of energy
• Thermal contact of two large systems
• The absolute temperature
• Experimental determination of the absolute temperature
• The units of temperature
• Experimental determination of heat
• Experimental determination of the number of quantum states
• The entropy of an isolated system
• The entropy of a substance

Return to the outline of Statistical Mechanics

• An isolated system
• States of an isolated system
• An isolated system in equilibrium
• The fundamental postulate
• Configurations of an isolated system
• Irreversibility
• Ink particles
• Dissect the set of states of an isolated system into a family of configurations by using a variable
  
  

• An experiment that has many possible outcomes
• Construct a sample space at a suitable level of detail
• Probability of an event
• Conditioning
• Independent events
• Random variable
• Use a random variable to specify an event
• Use a random variable to dissect a sample space
• Probability distribution of a random variable
• Variance of a random variable
• A dimensionless measure of the fluctuation of a random variable

Return to the outline of Statistical Mechanics

Here are sections that I have now:

• Isolated systems
• Temperature
• The Boltzmann distribution
• Pressure
• Electric potential
• Chemical potential

Appendix

This is a review on Thermal Physics by Charles Kittle and Herbert Kroemer. I posted the review on Amazon on 2 December 2001.

This is by far THE BEST textbook on the subject. As many people say, thermodynamics is a subject that one has to learn at least three times. I can easily understand the very negative review from the undergraduate student at Berkely. The subject itself is hard, and simply is not for everyone, not for the first run at least. I say this from experience. I earned a Ph.D. degree over ten years ago, and took courses on thermodynamics at both undergraduate and graduate levels. I didn't understand the subject at all, and didn't find much use in my thesis work. However, something about the subject has kept me going back to it ever since. I now own about 40 books on the subject, and use the ideas almost daily in my research.