Physical Considerations
The ensemble formalises the notion that a physicist repeating an experiment again and again under the same macroscopic conditions, but unable to control the microscopic details, may expect to observe a range of different outcomes.
The notional size of the mental ensembles in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics and quantum statistical mechanics can be very large indeed, to include every possible microscopic state the system could be in, consistent with its observed macroscopic properties. But for important physical cases it can be possible to calculate averages directly over the whole of the thermodynamic ensemble, to obtain explicit formulas for many of the thermodynamic quantities of interest, often in terms of the appropriate partition function (see below). Some of these results are presented in the statistical mechanics article.
Read more about this topic: Statistical Ensemble (mathematical Physics)
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