Macrostates and Microstates are discussed in Statistical Mechanics and Statistical Thermodynamics. We will introduce them of this scenario that uses a coin flip of two coins.
There are four possible outcomes:
- heads, heads
- heads, tails
- tails, heads
- tails, tails
If we say that order doesn’t matter than the second and third are identical. We have three Macrostates.
- Macrostate(H,H)
- Macrostate(H,T)
- Macrostate(T,T)
Appendix A
This example has four microstates.
Microstates are different possible ways the system can achieve a macrostate.
Rob Sterling 