Christian Hettlage, 1976 — 175 p.
The concept of fundamental theories such as classical mechanics, electrodynamics, or quantum mechanics is to simplify physical systems as far as possible in order to obtain a set of fundamental rules containing all the physics, i.e. they attempt to understand the world (or. more humbly, the system under consideration) in terms of basic constituents and fundamental interactions. In what might perhaps be called its most glorious triumph, this reductionistic approach has led to the conclusion that the everyday world can be described by means of three particles (electron, up quark, and down quark) and four (strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational) interactions only.
However, this approach runs into difficulty if we are to explain more complex systems: An understanding of a cow on the meadow (or the inner workings of the brain of the reader) in terms of quarks and electrons is just impossible, the reason being, of course, that there are just so many of these constituents (and thus possibilities for combining them).
This clearly shows the need for synthetic theories, which statistical physics is an example of. The idea here is not to try and know all there is to know about a given system (e.g. all the positions and velocities of all its atoms). but rather to concentrate on bulk properties, accepting the need to content oneself with some average description. While arguably such an approach may seem slightly unsatisfactory, it proves tremendously powerful. Indeed, statistical physics has been one of the most successful theories of the 20th century.
