Computer systems have become so large and complex that the study
of the detailed behavior of "microscopic" processes may no
longer be fruitful, both because this detailed behavior may be
inaccessible, and because averaging effects may make this
detailed behavior irrelevant. The management of storage in a
modern object-oriented system is suitable for such aggregation
because the number of objects can be very large, and the
microscopic details may be inaccessible--especially in the face
of massive parallelism and microscopic transaction resolution.
Since statistical thermodynamics is the prediction of the
aggregate or macroscopic behavior from the statistics of the
microscopic behavior, we must first characterize what we mean by
these terms. We assume a classical (deterministic) model of
physics in which a system can have a well-defined state, and
from this state and a state-transition function, we can
completely predict all future states of the system. Such a
complete state we will call a microstate, since it