Macrostate and Microstate

A macrostate is the thermodynamic state of any system that is exactly characterized

by measurement of the system's properties such as P, V, T, H and number of moles
of each constituent. Thus, a macrostate does not change over time if its observable
properties do not change.

In contrast, a microstate for a system is all about time and the energy of the
molecules in that system. "In a system its energy is constantly being redistributed
among its particles. In liquids and gases, the particles themselves are constantly
redistributing in location as well as changing in the quanta (the individual amount of
energy that each molecule has) due to their incessantly colliding, bouncing off each
other with (usually) a different amount of energy for each molecule after the
collision.. Each specific way, each arrangement of the energy of each molecule in the
whole system at one instant is called a microstate."

In the next instant — and that really means in an extremely short time — at least a
couple of moving molecules out of the 6 x 10 23 will hit one another.. But if only one
molecule moves a bit slower because it had hit another and made that other one
move an exactly equal amount faster — then that would be a different microstate.
(The total energy hasn't changed when molecular movement changes one
microstate into another. Every microstate for a particular system has exactly the
total energy of the macrostate because a microstate is just an instantaneous
quantum energy-photo of the whole system.)

That's why, in an instant for any particular macrostate, its motional energy* has
been rearranged as to what molecule has what amount of energy. In other words,
the system — the macrostate — rapidly and successively changes to be in a gigantic
number of different microstates out of the “gazillions” of accessible microstates, (In
solids, the location of the particles is almost the same from instant to instant, but not
exactly, because the particles are vibrating a tiny amount from a fixed point at
enormous speeds.)

Now we know what a microstate is, but what good is something that we can just
imagine as an impossible fast camera shot? The answer is loud and clear. We can
calculate the numbers for a given macrostate and we find that microstates give us
answers about the relation between molecular motion and entropy — i.e., between
molecules (or atoms or ions) constantly energetically speeding, colliding with each
other, moving distances in space (or, just vibrating rapidly in solids) and what we
measure in a macrostate as its entropy. As you have read elsewhere, entropy is a
(macro) measure of the spontaneous dispersal of energy, how widely spread out it
becomes (at a specific temperature). Then, because the number of microstates that
are accessible for a system indicates all the different ways that energy can be
arranged in that system, the larger the number of microstates accessible, the greater
is a system's entropy at a given temperature.
Inserting that value in the Boltzmann equation gives us a result that should boggle
one's mind because it is among the largest numbers in science. (The estimated
number of atoms in our entire galaxy is around 1070 while the number for the
whole universe may be about 1080. A very large number in math is 10100 and
called "a googol" — not Google!) Crystalline ice at 273 K has
101,299,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 accessible microstates. (Writing 5,000
zeroes per page, it would take not just reams of paper, not just reams piled miles
high, but light years high of reams of paper to list all those microstates!)