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I am looking for relevant books to study the modeling and Monte Carlo simulation of protein chains.
I see that books related to Statistical Physics, Statistical Mechanics, and Molecular Modeling have many overlapping areas of discussion that are related to protein modeling and simulation.
What is the basic difference between Statistical Physics, Statistical Mechanics, and Molecular Modeling in connection with protein modeling & simulation?
Statistical mechanics: is a mathematical framework that applies statistical methods and probability theory to large assemblies of microscopic entities [this is the first line in the linked article].
Statistical physics: is a less-commonly used term, and can cover more broad areas of physics (e.g. applying statistical methods and probability theory to more than just the "mechanics" of large assemblies of microscopic entities). Linguistically, "statistical mechanics" would be a subset of statistical physics.
Molecular modeling: may or may not involve statistical mechanics. If you model just one molecule and never consider statistics in any way, it's still "molecular modeling" but not statistical (e.g. imagine just calculating the ground state energy of the H2 molecule, rather than calculating the distribution of velocities among billions of molecules in an ensemble).
