FYI these notes by david tong contain the clearest explanation of statistical mechanics i’ve ever read, including stuff by feynman and that one blog post by terence tao
damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/stat
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his other notes are delightful also. i think i’m starting to understand what “thinking like a physicist” means. a big part of it appears to be being a good analyst in the sense of knowing what terms can be neglected in an expansion. a lot of physical laws have a tacit “+ O(sth)”
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i was hoping to understand phase transitions in particular and i think i have a bit more of a handle on them now but will need to do some calculations for it to really settle in. feels good tho. this is stuff i’ve wanted to understand for like a decade