About This Book Plasma Astrophysics: History and Neighbours 1 Particles and Fields: Exact Self-Consistent Description 11 Interacting particles and Liouville's theorem 111 Continuity in phase space 112 The character of particle interactions 113 The Lorentz force, gravity 114 Collisional friction in plasma 115 The exact distribution function 12 Charged particles in the electromagnetic field 121 General formulation of the problem 122 The continuity equation for electric charge 123 Initial equations and initial conditions 124 Astrophysical plasma applications 13 Gravitational systems 14 Practice: Exercises and Answers 2 Statistical Description of Interacting Particle Systems 21 The averaging of Liouville's equation 211 Averaging over phase space 212 Two statistical postulates 213 A statistical mechanism of mixing in phase space 214 The derivation of a general kinetic equation 22 A collisional integral and correlation functions 221 Binary interactions 222 Binary correlation 223 The collisional integral and binary correlation 23 Equations for correlation functions 24 Practice: Exercises and Answers ……