User talk:Denevans

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[edit] Liouville's Theorem (Hamiltonian)

Can we have a discussion on your recent mods to this - whilst I'm sure many are useful, they seem to put the cart before the horse (if I were a 3rd year physicist I don't think I'd follow your early description) and in one or two places seem to me to muddle things (eg in _my_ world the convective derivative is NOT a definition it's a deduction ; and again your statement on Hamiltonian and non-Hamiltonian systems is rather unclear).

Phase space is in any case discussed elsewhere. Avogadro's number is an irrelevance - stat mechanics applies to much larger and smaller system's than the 1 gram-mol scale!

The equation you call Liouville's appears to me be 'just' a conservation of D equation found by integrating over a control volume (ie the RHS is div (D 'v') where 'v' is a p,q 'velocity') - it's NOT the one physicists and theoretical chemists look to to eg justify the weighting on the Boltzmann distro. It is indeed used later on as the (nearly self-evident :-)) starting point for the 'fluids' proof.

(Is there a subtle distinction between LE (which already has an article) and LT which we should strive to maintain?)

Can we avoid the use of the term symplectic system until later - it may well be idea du jour to mathematicians and advanced physicists - but Wiki still lacks an adequate succinct expostulation accessible to a graduate-physicist (of my generation.) At present all symplectic space refs spin off into ideas like 1-forms, tangent bundles etc., which may be simple but not if not explained.

The dynamics of non-hamiltonian systems and non-conservation of heat are of course important, but most physicists sidestep them, being interested in micro-systems, or treating the system as embedded in a larger system obeying conservation.

It may be that this dual approach combining the 'physics' and symplectic systems ways is doomed not to work, like the tensors fiasco, but we can at least try.


Can we talk? Your place or mine, or in the appropriate talk page? Linuxlad 15:14, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Spam

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