ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some of the mystery surrounding thermodynamics and hopefully illuminate and expose some of its beauty. It deals with the conditions of equilibrium and the corresponding mass action expressions. The chapter discusses the chemical stability of binary compounds and the concept of electrochemical potentials. The heat liberated or consumed during the formation of a compound from its elements can be determined experimentally using calorimetry. Configurational, where the entropy is related to the number of configurations in which the various atoms and/or defects can be arranged on a given number of lattice sites. Microscopically, to understand the concept of thermal entropy, or heat capacity for that matter, one needs to appreciate that the vibrational energy levels of atoms in a crystal are quantized. Some elements and compounds have magnetic or dielectric moments. These moments can be randomly oriented, or they may be ordered.
