The Temperature Knob: Statistical Mechanics from Steam to Neural Networks

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 1h 4m

Maxwell, Boltzmann and Gibbs; entropy as counting, Shannon and Jaynes; the Boltzmann distribution and softmax temperature; partition functions and free energy; Ising, Peierls and Onsager; mean field theory; critical opalescence, universality and Wilson's renormalisation group; Metropolis Monte Carlo, cluster algorithms and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo; spin glasses and Parisi; Hopfield networks, Boltzmann machines and the 2024 Nobel prize; diffusion models, Langevin dynamics and fluctuation theorems; Maxwell's demon and Landauer; quantum statistics and negative temperature; loss landscapes, double…