A STATISTICAL INTERPRETATION OF THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES IN DILUTE GASES

摘要

The report is entirely self-consistent and is intended to be accessible to beginners, prerequisite being only a knowledge of the derivation from first principles of the Boltzmann equation, and elemen-tary properties of the so-called collision operator. All the details are worked out, even the reduction of the so-called curly bracket's to ordinary collision integrals, an analysis that is thoroughly carried out by Chapman and Cowling, but which may be much simplified under the present conditions. This explains the length of the report.