with the usual definitions: h is the Planck constant, m the mass of a particle, k the Boltzmann constant and T the absolute temperature. In an ideal gas z is the partition function of a single particle in a container of volume V. In order to derive the Van der Waals equation we assume now that each particle moves independently in an average potential field offered by the other particles. The averaging over the particles is easy because we will assume that the particle density of the Van der Waals fluid is homogeneous. The interaction between a pair of particles, which are hard spheres, is taken to be: