Assistant Professor of History and the Himan Brown Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow at Cornell University, Mostafa Minawi spoke Nov. 8 about Saudi Arabia's rejection of a seat on the United Nations Security Council, offering his insight on the possible motivations behind it and its implications for regional and global politics.…

On September 16, 2013, the Cornell International Affairs Review sat down with Professor Ross Brann. During the interview, Professor Brann provided a broad historical overview of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and commented on the latest developments in the ongoing peace talks.

On March 29th, 2013, Cornell University professor of Near Eastern Studies and Government, David Patel spoke about the impact of the Iraq War ten years after its start on the American public's perception of US involvement abroad and most importantly, on the political atmosphere in Iraq today. photo: http://atlanticinfocus.tumblr.com/…

On February 22nd, 2013, Cornell university professor of Government and expert on China, Andrew Mertha spoke about the recent Chinese cyber attacks disclosed by US cyber security company Mandiant and the impact it may have on future US-China relations.

On November 29, 2012, the Cornell International Affairs Review recorded this talk with Professor Allen Carlson. Professor Carlson addresses a range of topics including China's leadership transition, U.S.-China Relations, and China's status as a global power.

On October 18, 2012, the Cornell International Affairs Review recorded this talk with independent journalist John Psardopoulos. Photo Credit: AFP/Getty Images

On June 25, 2012, the Cornell International Affairs Review recorded this talk with Professor Jean Petaux at Sciences Po Bordeaux. The talk will also be made available in French.

On June 14, 2012, the Cornell International Affairs Review recorded this talk with Giuseppe Gabusi at the Catholic University of Milan's Postgraduate School of Economics and International Relations. Professor Gabusi's full profile can be found on the Torino World Affairs Institute's website http://www.twai.it/index/aboutus/ Photo: AlJazeera…

On June 13, 2012, the Cornell International Affairs Review recorded this talk with Tiziana Caponio at the University of Turin's Department of Political Science. Photo: AFP/Getty

On June 27, 2012, the Cornell International Affairs Review recorded this talk with Nicolas Véron in Paris. Mr. Véron's bio can be found on Bruegel's website http://www.bruegel.org/scholars/scholar-detail/scholar/9-nicolas-veron/

On June 28, 2012, the Cornell International Affairs Review recorded this talk with Professor Stephane Lacroix at Sciences Po in Paris. Professor Lacroix's full bio is available on the Sciences Po website http://kuwaitprogram.sciences-po.fr/people/research-team/10-bio3.html

On June 13, 2012, the Cornell International Affairs Review recorded this talk with Stefano Ruzza at the University of Turin's Department of Political Science. Professor Ruzza's full profile can be found on the Torino World Affairs Institute's website at http://www.twai.it/index/aboutus/

We finish off the low temperature corrections to the magnetization in a ferromagnet due to spin wave excitations, and also calculate the energy and heat capacity of spin waves. Now, on to antiferromagnets, where neighboring spins are antialigned. We derive the susceptibility, and the spin wave dispersion. Due to technical difficulties, I post last …

We talk more about holes today. They don't really exist, you know! But when only a few electrons are missing from the valence band, it's so much more convenient to describe only the missing states that the fictional particles we call "holes" are a very useful concept. We talk more about their mass, velocity, momentum, and other properties. Then we …

We define the heat capacity, and calculate the phonon heat capacity in the high and low temperature limits. We also introduce the density of states. Technical difficulties meant that this lecture did not get recorded this year. In its place, I post last year's lecture 5: Lecture AudioPor Prof. Carlson

This is a final review for the last 1/4 of the course. This is a very short lecture, because we had a field trip to go see the prestigious Bagwell Lecture given by Purdue's very own Prof. Albert Overhauser of the world-famous Overhauser Effect. Lecture AudioPor Prof. Carlson

This is a final review for the first 3/4 of the course. Lecture AudioPor Prof. Carlson

We finish two more examples of the Fluctuation-Dissipation Theorem. This is a theorem that pops up everywhere! It means that the very same microscopic processes responsible for establishing thermal equilibrium are the same microscopic processes that cause resistance in metals, drag in fluids, and other types of dissipation. We discuss thermal noise…

Brownian motion was discovered by a botanist named Brown, when he looked at water under a microscope, and observed pollen grains "jiggling" about in it. Einstein eventually explained it as due to the random collisions the pollen grain experienced from the water molecules. We compare the pollen grain to a drunk person walking home, and calculate how…

Supercooling Demonstration (thanks to special guest Prof. Ken Ritchie): Put filtered water in a plastic bottle in your freezer for, say, 4 hours. Now, carefully remove it from the freezer, and shake the bottle vigorously. We did this, and saw ice crystals begin to slowly form in the water, because the liquid water was supercooled, and the ice phase…

Oil and water -- they don't mix. Or do they? Due to the entropy of mixing, any tiny amount of impurity is highly favored entropically. This means that in general, you can get a small amount of a substance to mix into another. But take that too far, and they no longer mix, but "phase separate" into 2 different concentrations. We discuss this from th…

Now that we know what order parameters are (see last lecture), we'll use the order parameter of a phase to construct the Landau free energy. The Landau free energy depends on the order parameter, and retains all the symmetries of the physical system. It's amazing how much you can get from symmetry, and we're able to see how it is that a ferromagnet…

We finish the van der Waals equation of state, and use it to illustrate the liquid-gas phase transition. It turns out that at low pressure, the van der Waals equation of state has a wiggle where (dp/pV)>0. Since this would cause an explosion, the system instead undergoes phase separation so that part of the container has liquid, and part has gas in…

We derive the shape of the phase boundary for solid to gas transitions (sublimation), examples being dry ice (CO2) or ice at low pressure. We derive the van der Waals equation of state, which is an improvement on the ideal gas equation pV=nRT. The ideal gas equation is based on two assumptions: 1. Particles occupy zero volume, and 2. Particles do n…

We finish discussing chemical reactions, including how fast they progress, and what a catalyst can do for you. Then we begin a new topic: phases of matter and phase transitions between them. You've heard of solid, liquid, and gas, but did you know about the other phases of matter? Other phases include liquid crystals (of which there are many types)…

We define the Gibbs Free Energy, which is the right energy function to use when you can control temperature, pressure, and particle number. This means chemists like it, because chemical reactions in a lab often take place under these conditions. We use this to derive the Law of Mass Action, which shows that the relative concentration of reactants d…

How refrigerators work. Why you can't cool your apartment by leaving the refrigerator door open. How heat and work depend on which path is taken. How to do completely meaningless work, the kind that's turned entirely into heat. We prove why the free energy is a useful concept: it tells you the maximum amount of work you can expect to extract from a…

We're having a midterm exam Wednesday, and today is a review of everything in chapters 1-7 in the text, Kittel and Kroemer's Thermal Physics. Topics include: Fundamental assumption of statistical mechanics, Laws of Thermodynamics, Probabilities and the Partition Function, Entropy and Temperature, Heat Capacity and Energy, Thermodynamic Identity, He…

Storytime with Thursday Next (Jasper Fforde), and her Uncle Mycroft's entropy-detecting entroposcope. Why are large-scale systems capable of producing irreversible processes (like glass breaking, or red and blue Kool-aid mixing), even though the microscopic processes are reversible? We finish the electronic heat capacity of metals, first with an ea…

More about Bose condensates. They're really weird -- at the lowest temperature, all bosons flock to the lowest available state, producing a "Bose condensate". Due to quantum mechanics, this is a remarkably stable state of matter, and is very hard to disturb. In fact, because the chemical potential becomes negative, it costs negative energy to add a…

Now that we've derived absolutely everything about the ideal gas from scratch, it's time to do something useful with it! We'd like to eventually learn how to use this stuff to build engines and refrigerators. Today we discuss the basic processes (reversible expansions) that are the building blocks of engines and refrigerators. We also cover Bose co…

Review of Fermions and Bosons. Review of Fermi Gas. All about the Bose gas, and its ditsrubution function. In the classical limit, the Fermi-Dirac distribution function and the Bose-Einstein distribution function approach the same form, and we recover ideal gas physics. We derive many properties about the ideal gas, and extend it to the case of int…

Why no two pieces of matter may occupy the same space at the same time. Fermions are antisocial; bosons are social. Bosonic examples: lasers and superfluid helium. All about Fermions. Fermions obey the Pauli exclusion principle, and each state may have either 0 or 1 fermions in it, and no more. Class Discussions: more about aluminum, what about pos…

When the system and reservoir can trade particles, you can't use the Boltzmann factor and the partition function anymore. Instead, use the Gibbs factor, and the grand partition function (or Gibbs sum). We introduce these new things, and then apply them to semiconductors, aluminum soft drink cans, and blood. Lecture Audio…

Introducing a new thermodynamically conjugate pair of variables: number of particles and chemical potential. Internal and external chemical potential. Voltmeters measure the total chemical potential. Great class brainstorm on internal voltages in your life. How to get a theory named after yourself. Spins in a magnetic field. Why atmospheric pressur…

Deriving Planck's law of blackbody radiation. How to use it to tell the temperature of a star. Discussions about stars -- absorption lines and redshifts, and how to get the temperature correct anyway. Student demo of astronomy course software -- very cool. Counting photons is like counting phonons. (Phonons are quantized vibrational modes in solids…

Deriving the ideal gas law. Equipartition Theorem. Entropy of Mixing. Hot things glow -- or how night vision goggles work (Planck blackbody radiation). Analyzing star spectra. Class discussions: Mixing 2 colors of Kool-Aid, and how to make heavy Kool-Aid out of deuterated water. Why deuterated water can extend the snow skiing season, but is unfortu…

Helmholtz Free Energy is the right energy to use when temperature and volume are used as control variables. Free Energy and the Partition Function. Maxwell Relations -- you can derive them all. Legendre Transforms. Ideal Gas. Quantum Concentration. Why some slow processes are still irreversible, as with toast and frogs. Lecture Audio…

Boltzmann Factor, Partition Function and how to calculate everything else from it. Live near lakes because they have a high heat capacity. Energy and Heat Capacity of a two state system, Definition of a reversible process, Definition of pressure, The Thermodynamic Identity, Thermodynamically Conjugate variables. Digressions: Is toasting bread a rev…

Fundamental assumption of statistical mechanics: all accessible states are equally likely. Ensemble averages are weighted averages. Two systems in thermal contact. How to define entropy and temperature. How to take partial derivatives. The laws of thermodynamics. Lecture 3 AudioPor Prof. Carlson

Why is the most probable configuration important? Multiplicity Function is a gaussian in the two-state system. Weighted averages. Introduction to partition function. Lecture 2 AudioPor Prof. Carlson

Lightning fast review of quantum mechanics. Stationary quantum states, accessible states, fundamental assumptions of statistical mechanics. How to get from the microscopic quantum level to the macroscopic behavior you observe. We visualized atomic orbitals using Atom in a Box by Dean Dauger. Lecture Audio…