ABSTRACT

In one of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm a pot of porridge boils over. It does not stop doing so until almost the whole town is covered in porridge. Even though we may not yet be in the position of explaining why a whole town can be covered by the content of a single pot of porridge we are – in principle – able to explain the boiling of porridge. We know that porridge is made up of, say, tiny porridge molecules that collectively constitute an admittedly rather viscous liquid. Sitting in the pot on the oven the kinetic energy of the molecules increases. Many-particle physics is able to describe this process. Eventually the process leads to a phase-transition of the first kind (boiling).