Prof. Leonard Susskind addresses the apparent contradiction between the reversibility of classical mechanics and the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy generally increases. This topic leads to a discussion of the foundation of chaos theory. Recorded on May 13, 2013.

1. Entropy and Conservation of Information
2. Temperature
3. Maximizing Entropy
4. The Boltzmann Distribution
5. Pressure of an Ideal Gas and Fluctuations
6. Weakly-interacting Gases, Heat, and Work
7. Entropy vs. Reversibility
8. Entropy, reversibility, and magnetism
9. The Ising model
10. Liquid-gas phase transition

Statistical mechanics is a branch of physics that applies probability theory to the study of the thermodynamic behavior of systems composed of a large number of particles. Statistical mechanics provides a framework for relating the microscopic properties of individual atoms and molecules to the macroscopic bulk properties of materials that can be observed in everyday life. Thus it explains thermodynamics as a result of the classical and quantum-mechanical descriptions of statistics and mechanics at the microscopic level.