Macrostates

Macrostates are sets of Microstates.

Assume that we have microstates, each created by two coin flips. There are four microstates.

• heads, heads
• heads, tails
• tails, heads
• heads, heads

We need something quantitative about each microstate so that we can order them.

Let heads give 1 point and tails give zero points. This makes it so heads, tails and tails,heads are equal. They are thus in the same macrostate. Both heads, heads and tails, tails are in macrostates that only have a single microstate.