Purpose of Writing

Peculiarities

The name of this repository is called “Dissertations”, not for a university degree but on particular subjects.

While most textbooks are making concerted effort to build an organized logical system and recent papers are focusing on cutting-edge technology and science, the articles in this repository have been being created for particular subjects which is not novel but wonderful.

Differences in Logic (Compared with Textbooks)

Without the constraint of covering all facets, I can focus on one topic and organize imformation accordingly including theories, history, practical use and even my own thoughts and feelings.

Hence the articles here are topic oriented,just like a target. Instead of a tree which most textbooks resemble, since they develop from a starting point to a complicated theory.

Difference in Scope (Compared with Papers)

While most puplished papers nowadays are focusing on frontiers of science and technology, the classical branches of a discipline are still worth exploring at least for me.

From my point of view, we can obtain intellectual nourishment from:

• Developing process of a concept, such as entropy(by Carnot and Clausius) and temperature.

• Developing process of a model (prototype of a theory), such as Ideal Gas Law to Van der Waals model, Boltzmann factor to Gibbs factor etc.

• Contribution, story and even biography of scientists.

• Knowledge.

I put “Knowlege” in the last entry, because the mission and duty of scientists is to discover and create new theories(knowledge), contrary to that of students whose significant target is to get higher scores in exams.

Walking through the basic theory of science is an enjoyment. It is an oppertunity to think as a scientist.

When to Update

I will update this reopsitory “Dissertations” when I take lessons in unversity as well as when I learn something enlightening. Thus, I view this repo as a record but also a platform for sharing that piece of enjoyment.

Supplements

As you can see, the format of the documents is not uniform. The reason is that they were written in different period with various media.

• The documents written in Autumn 2023 are scanned version of A4 papers where I wrote down them by hands.
• While in Spring 2024 I explored several platforms such as ZhiHu with different formats including LaTeX, markdown, pdf, A4 paper etc.

When I was struggling to put them in an organized way, Git and GitHub occurs to me. I decide to use this version control system to store my dissertations. Please forgive me the unsystematic file formats and I will try to use mardown uniformly in the future. Some of the markdown files will lead you to ZhiHu where I first published these articles.