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!
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!