III.69 Phase Transitions


If you heat up a block of ice, then it turns into water. This very familiar phenomenon is actually rather mysterious, because it shows that the properties of the chemical H2O do not depend continuously on temperature: the block of ice goes straight from a solid to a liquid, rather than doing so by a process of gradual softening.

This is an example of a phase transition. Phase transitions tend to occur in systems that involve a large number of particles with “local” interactions—that is, where the behavior of one particle is directly influenced only by the particles in its immediate vicinity.

Such systems can be modeled mathematically, and the study of these models belongs to the area known as statistical physics. For further discussion of such models, see PROBABILISTIC MODELS OF CRITICAL PHENOMENA [IV.25].

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