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cnidocyte
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In my textbook they claim that:
They lost me when they said "thermodynamic state". Do they mean thermodynamic system? I know that a system such as a container of gas will have a very large number of microstates considering the amount of gas molecules present and that statistical methods would be required to calculate the number of microstates. I know that a system like this also has macrostates such as pressure, volume, temperature etc. but I don't know what they mean when they say a thermodynamic "state" has a number of microstates associated with it. To add to my confusion, a bit further down they say:Each thermodynamic state has a characteristic number of microstates associated with it, and we use the symbol W for this number.
What macroscopic states are they talking about here? Are they saying macrostates like pressure or volume have microstates associated with them?Thus, entropy is a measure of how many microstates are associated with a particular macroscopic state.