Page:Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics (1902).djvu/190

166 which in general is an equation of few variables, is derived from the fundamental mechanical equation, which in the case of the bodies of nature is one of an enormous number of variables.

We have also to enunciate in mechanical terms, and to prove, what we call the tendency of heat to pass from a system of higher temperature to one of lower, and to show that this tendency vanishes with respect to systems of the same temperature.

At least, we have to show by a priori reasoning that for such systems as the material bodies which nature presents to us, these relations hold with such approximation that they are sensibly true for human faculties of observation. This indeed is all that is really necessary to establish the science of thermodynamics on an a priori basis. Yet we will naturally desire to find the exact expression of those principles of which the laws of thermodynamics are the approximate expression. A very little study of the statistical properties of conservative systems of a finite number of degrees of freedom is sufficient to make it appear, more or less distinctly, that the general laws of thermodynamics are the limit toward which the exact laws of such systems approximate, when their number of degrees of freedom is indefinitely increased. And the problem of finding the exact relations, as distinguished from the approximate, for systems of a great number of degrees of freedom, is practically the same as that of finding the relations which hold for any number of degrees of freedom, as distinguished from those which have been established on an empirical basis for systems of a great number of degrees of freedom.

The enunciation and proof of these exact laws, for systems of any finite number of degrees of freedom, has been a principal object of the preceding discussion. But it should be distinctly stated that, if the results obtained when the numbers of degrees of freedom are enormous coincide sensibly with the general laws of thermodynamics, however interesting and significant this coincidence may be, we are still far from