| Macrostate | Microstate |
|---|---|
| Describe using state variables | Positions and velocities of all particles |
| Specified by U,V,N | Specified by xi,vi |
| Entropy gives the most likely macrostate | At constant temperature, each microstate has probability given by the Boltzmann distribution |
This is a distribution that gives the probability of a microstate when the system is connected to a big system at temperature T.
P(microstate i)=e−Ei/kT∑je−Ej/kT