In a certain sense this book has been twenty-five years in the writing, since I first struggled with the foundations of the subject as a graduate student. It has taken that long to develop a deep appreciation of what Gibbs was attempting to convey to us near the end of his life and to understand fully the same ideas as resurrected by E.T. Jaynes much later. Many classes of students were destined to help me sharpen these thoughts before I finally felt confident that, for me at least, the foundations of the subject had been clarified sufficiently. More than anything, this work strives to...

In this volume we continue the logical development of the work begun in Volume I, and the equilibrium theory now becomes a very special case of the exposition presented here. Once a departure is made from equilibrium, however, the problems become deeper and more subtle-and unlike the equilibrium theory, many aspects of nonequilibrium phenomena remain poorly understood. For over a century a great deal of effort has been expended on the attempt to develop a comprehensive and sensible description of nonequilibrium phenomena and irreversible processes. What has emerged is a hodgepodge of ad hoc...