Course Introduction 3.20 Materials at Equilibrium, Fall 2003
Actually, the title is interesting. It is Materials of Equilibrium. A lot of people who look at the content would think of this as, you know, this comes out of a course that used to be called Thermodynamics of Materials which is a standard staple of students who would do graduate materials education. Almost everybody would have this as a requirement. We deliberately changed the title to Materials of Equilibrium to make it something broader. We really wanted it to be Standard Classical Thermodynamics, which is what we do, but wanted to broaden that into sort of modern metrics to understand and study the energetics of the materials. What we do is we essentially teach, first of all, we teach three large segments. One is classical thermodynamics. And the idea is that people need to see the general frame in which you can set up an energy description for materials. How they react with their environment. How they react with other systems. So we wanted to teach them first the gen...