The Macro Picture

One of the most important and useful concepts that creeps out of physics is the partition function. The main idea I will be trying to form here isn’t another summary of thermodynamics, but rather how this phenomena—which is extremely useful for our physical observations—can be seen in our every day lives and, most importantly, in our economies.

The Physical Definition

We start by the usual definition of our probability of the system being in a particular state $i$. For everyone familiar with the concept of normalization, we know that this $Z$ factor has to allow this entire thing to add up to be one: