ABSTRACT
Because there are such large numbers involved, statistical treatments leads to great certainty in the predictions of macroscopic quantities and this is the power of statistical mechanics. Unlike classical thermodynamics, which deals with experimentally derived equations of state to describe the relationship between macroscopic properties of gases, statistical mechanics seeks to derive these macroscopic relationships from microscopic properties which, in some circumstances, involve the quantum aspects of matter. Since analysis of single molecules in these circumstances is not feasible, we gain access to these microscopic quantities by considering the statistics of the properties of large numbers of individual molecules.
