This will make more sense if you have a basic grasp on quantum mechanics, but if you’re willing to accept “energy comes in discrete units” as a premise then you should be mostly fine.
My current understanding is that QM is not-at-all needed to make sense of stat mech. Instead, the thing where energy is equally likely to be in any of the degrees of freedom just comes from using a measure over your phase space such that the dynamical law of your system preservers that measure!
For learning the foundational principles of stat mech, yes, you can start that way. For example, you can certainly come up with definitions of pressure and temperature for an ideal gas or calculate the heat capacity of an Einstein solid without any quantum considerations. But once you start asking questions about real systems, the quantization is hugely important for e.g. understanding the form of the partition function.
My current understanding is that QM is not-at-all needed to make sense of stat mech. Instead, the thing where energy is equally likely to be in any of the degrees of freedom just comes from using a measure over your phase space such that the dynamical law of your system preservers that measure!
For learning the foundational principles of stat mech, yes, you can start that way. For example, you can certainly come up with definitions of pressure and temperature for an ideal gas or calculate the heat capacity of an Einstein solid without any quantum considerations. But once you start asking questions about real systems, the quantization is hugely important for e.g. understanding the form of the partition function.