I’m teaching Statistical and Thermal Physics this semester using Gould and Tobochnik’s text of the same name. The text comes with Java programs to run simulations to help students (and me!) gain understanding about how systems with large numbers of particles behave.

On pages 9-10 of Statistical and Thermal Physics, Gould/Tobochnik describe a simple model of a non-interacting ideal gas which I’ve implemented as an iPython Notebook; the algorithm loads N particles in a box with nLeft particles initially in the left half (and consequently N-nLeft on the right half), and then generates a random number (r) between zero and one and compares this number to the ratio of nLeft/N. If , then a particle is moved from the left to the right, otherwise a particle is moved from the right to the left. This process is run repeatedly (user specified timeSteps for each run) to simulate the evolution of the system as a function of the number of steps taken (this isn’t a proper time evolution, as we’re not solving Newton’s Laws here)

The notebook  IdealGasInABox.ipynb implements this, and allows one to easily run 1, 10, or any number of simulations and average the results to show the number of particles on the left side of the box as a function of the number of steps taken. Above you can see an example plot from the code.

If you’re new to the iPython Notebook Viewer, here’s the scoop: The link above will render the notebook in your browser, and at the top right of the rendered page will be a download link. My advice is to right click the link and select Save As… to save the .ipynb file to your hard drive. You may have to edit the file name, because I find on my Mac that the file is saved with an unneeded .txt extension at the end. I remove the .txt and then my mac recognizes this as a iPython notebook that can be opened with Enthought’s Canopy application.