Boltzmann constant by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This is not a truly "fundamental" constant of nature like say the speed of light or the Planck constant.
Rather, it is just a definition of our Kelvin temperature scale, linking average microscopic energy to our macroscopic temperature scale.
The way to think about that link is, at 1 Kelvin, each particle has average energy:
per degree of freedom.
This is why the units of the Boltzmann constant are Joules per Kelvin.
For an ideal monatomic gas, say helium, there are 3 degrees of freedom. so each helium atom has average energy:
If we have 2 atoms at 1 K, they will have average energy , and so on.
Another conclusion is that this defines temperature as being proportional to the total energy. E.g. if we had 1 helium atom at 2 K then we would have about energy, 3 K and so on.
This energy is of course just an average: some particles have more, and others less, following the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution.
chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/7696/how-do-i-distinguish-between-internal-energy-and-enthalpy/7700#7700 has a good insight:
To summarize, internal energy and enthalpy are used to estimate the thermodynamic potential of the system. There are other such estimates, like the Gibbs free energy G. Which one you choose is determined by the conditions and how easy it is to determine pressure and volume changes.
Entropy by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
OK, can someone please just stop the philosophy and give numerical predictions of how entropy helps you predict the future?
The original notion of entropy, and the first one you should study, is the Clausius entropy.
Video 1.
The Unexpected Side of Entropy by Daan Frenkel
. Source. 2021.
Video 2.
The Biggest Ideas in the Universe | 20. Entropy and Information by Sean Carroll (2020)
Source. In usual Sean Carroll fashion, it glosses over the subject. This one might be worth watching. It mentions 4 possible definitions of entropy: Boltzmann, Gibbs, Shannon (information theory) and John von Neumann (quantum mechanics).
Temperature by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
For scales from absolute 0 like Kelvin, is proportional to the total kinetic energy of the material.
The Boltzmann constant tells us how much energy that is, i.e. gives the slope.
TODO there was one which was relly good, can't find it anymore. One day.
Figure 1.
Life difficulty level meme with West Europe, East Europe, Turkey and Middle east
. Source.
The Google Story Chapter 21. A Virtual Library mentions that Paul Allen was interested in trying to create something like the "Final Encyclopedia" from this book. This is somewhat the same motivation for Google Books and Google's activities more broadly, as shown in their organise the world's information mission statement.
Csound by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
XML file format (but with 99% of the action of interest in a domain-specific language on the CsInstruments and CsScore elements) that can be played and the reference implementation. Offers complex effects out-of-box apparently.
Allows you to easily define instruments with seemingly arbitrary mathematical functions, and then use them to play notes at given time intervals.
The instrument functions can be parametrized, and each note played can have different parameters.
The instrument definition actually defines a block diagram graph, much like a hardware synthesizer would.
Csound is so not-bloated that it contains an UI system. And it includes an interactive virtual MIDI keyboard that interacts with parameter knobs: www.csounds.com/manual/html/MidiTop.html
But hey, it's fun. And like any other good domain-specific language, debugging it is barbaric of course.
If only it had been written in Python... the array manipulation boilerplate would be likely perfect for NumPy, and this would have been exactly what Ciro Santilli wanted!
CSound states that one of its design goals is backward compatibility, and it shows. Some of the stuff is utterly arcane, e.g. you have to remember what GEN10, GEN11, etc. mean instead of having named enums.
It just worked on Ubuntu 20.04 no questions asked:
sudo apt install csound
git clone https://github.com/csound/csound
cd csound
git checkout 92409ecce053d707360a5794f5f4f6bf5ebf5d24
csound examples/xanadu.csd
which runs this file: github.com/csound/csound/blob/92409ecce053d707360a5794f5f4f6bf5ebf5d24/examples/xanadu.csd and this plays a relly cool sound demo:
Video 1.
Xanadu Csound demo
. Source.
Save to file instead of playing:
csound -o xanadu.wav xanadu.csd
or direct ogg output:
csound --ogg -o xanadu.ogg xanadu.csd
or pipe to stdout to FFmpeg TODO: stackoverflow.com/questions/64970503/how-to-pipe-csound-output-to-ffmpeg-for-conversion-without-an-intermediate-file
TODO find the most amazing set of songs made with it on GitHub? Some examples:
Documentation-wise, it's a bit lacking. The only dude who can explain it really well, Dr Richard Boulanger, made the "The Csound Book" closed source, so, congrats, this will forever hurt the popularity of Csound.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact