Product Description: Unabridged Dover (1993) republication of the edition published by The Macmillan Press, Ltd., London and Basingstoke, England 1978. Preface. Introduction. Glossary. vii+182pp.

Product Description: Using the mathematical theory of Brownian motion, this book comprehensively develops the statistical basis of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Following a summary of the phenomenological approach to nonequilibrium thermodynamics and an introduction to Brownian motion, Professor Lavenda presents well-known theorems in nonequilibrium thermodynamics from a unifying standpoint of stochastic theory and statistical formulations of nonequilibrium thermodynamics, and shows how the phenomenological laws of nonequilibrium thermodynamics arise in the limit of small thermal fluctuations and in the Gaussian limit where means and modes of the distribution coincide...read more