Title Details

Dilip Kondepudi is a Professor in the Chemistry Department, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA. Viscount Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, the Director of the International Solvay Institutes, Brussels, Belgium, and the Director of the Ilya Prigogine Center for Studies in Statistical Mechanics and Complex Systems, University of Texas at Austin, USA. The Nobel Prize was awarded in recognition of his contributions to nonequilibrium physics and especially thermodynamics far from equilibrium. He is the recipient of honorary degrees from more than forty universities around the world, and has had five institutes devoted to the study of complex systems named after him.

HISTORICAL ROOTS: FROM HEAT ENGINES TO COSMOLOGY.

The Basic Concepts.

The First Law of Thermodynamics.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Arrow of Time.

Entropy in the Realm of Chemical Reactions.

EQUILIBRIUM THERMODYNAMICS.

Extremum Principles and General Thermodynamic Relations.

Basic Thermodynamics of Gases, Liquids and Solids.

Phase Change.

Solutions.

Chemical Transformations.

Fields and Internal Degrees of Freedom.

Thermodynamics of Radiation.

FLUCTUATIONS AND STABILITY.

The Gibbs Stability Theory.

Critical Phenomena and Configurational Heat Capacity.

Stability and Fluctuations Based on Entropy Production.

LINEAR NONEQUILIBRIUM THERMODYNAMICS.

Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics: The Foundations.

Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics: The Linear Regime.

Nonequilibrium Stationary States and Their Stability: Linear Regime.

ORDER THROUGH FLUCTUATIONS.

Nonlinear Thermodynamics.

Dissipative Structures.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Postface.

Standard Thermodynamic Properties.

Physical Constants and Data.

Index.