(You) got to have faith!

* Thermodynamics - (from the Greek thermos meaning heat and dynamis meaning power) is a branch of physics that studies the effects of changes in temperature, pressure, and volume on physical systems at the macroscopic scale by analyzing the collective motion of their particles using statistics.
Roughly, heat means "energy in transit" and dynamics relates to "movement"; thus, in essence thermodynamics studies the movement of energy and how energy instills movement.
Historically, thermodynamics developed out of the need to increase the efficiency of early steam engines.

* Dynamics - is the branch of classical mechanics that is concerned with the effects of forces on the motion of objects.
What that means is we do a lot of equations of motion and how forces are acting on MOVING things. Statics was all about things sitting still like buildings and such. Dynamics now does things moving, which makes things about two million times as complicated and time consuming.

Now Quantum Mechanics is the study of particles. It is also a fundamental branch of theoretical physics that replaces Newtonian mechanics and classical electromagnetism at the atomic and subatomic levels. It is a bunch of mess because now we have to take integrals and derivatives of all sorts of messy wavefunctions and it takes like eight hours to finish one problem. Ack.

If you understood any of that, you are probably better off then over half our class.