Abstract

The thermodynamic behavior is analyzed of a single classical charged particle in thermal equilibrium with classical electromagnetic thermal radiation, while electrostatically bound by a fixed charge distribution of opposite sign. A quasistatic displacement of this system in an applied electrostatic potential is investigated. Treating the system nonrelativistically, the change in internal energy, the work done, and the change in caloric entropy are all shown to be expressible in terms of averages involving the distribution of the position coordinates alone. A convenient representation for the probability distribution is shown to be the ensemble average of the absolute square value of an expansion over the eigenstates of a Schrödinger-like equation, since the heat flow is shown to vanish for each hypothetical “state.” Subject to key assumptions highlighted here, the demand that the entropy be a function of state results in statistical averages in agreement with the form in quantum statistical mechanics. Examining the very low and very high temperature situations yields Planck's and Boltzmann's constants. The blackbody radiation spectrum is then deduced. From the viewpoint of the theory explored here, the method in quantum statistical mechanics of statistically counting the “states” at thermal equilibrium by using the energy eigenvalue structure, is simply a convenient counting scheme, rather than actually representing averages involving physically discrete energy states