- #1
Wledig
- 69
- 1
I'm having trouble picturing the energy states for some systems. For instance, I was reading Reif's Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics, and at some point he talks about the energy states of a pool acting as a heat reservoir interacting with a bottle of wine. The problem is that this is clear for me in something like an Einstein solid, how you can have many states associated to a certain energy but I can't see it how it is possible in this example. When Reif draws a bar graph and says that we could have for example 100 000 states for an energy of 1000 J it doesn't feel right. Maybe something like an Einstein solid is implicit here, and we're taking states to correspond to vibrations of the atoms of the pool?