International specialists offer this clear exposition, at advanced undergraduate and post-graduate level, of the thermodynamics of extremes and its statistical foundations. They present new phenomena inappropriate to traditional laws of thermodynamics which highlight significant and wide-ranging applications relevant in chemical physics, biochemistry, mathematics, physics, astro-physics, astronomy and space science.

The book explains how modern thermodynamics applies to clusterization, black holes, gravitational collapse, critical phenomena, broadening spectral lines, or phenomena associated with the principles that the weakest link breaks the chain. This was not immediately obvious from traditional thermodynamics.

These extreme values are new variates having their own distributions, which are of vital importance, leading to the law limits which form the statistical foundations of the new thermodynamics. They decouple thermodynamics and probabilistic definitions, leading to a thermodynamic symmetry breaking which is unknown in traditional thermodynamics. Although entropy will lose its combinatorial flavour, it will continue to play the key role of bridging the gap between the microscopic and macroscopic worlds.