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The Distribution of Velocities
Maxwell worked out what Saturn's rings would be made of, and a hundred years later when they got there he was proved right, but mathematically. He argues that one of the two great principles of the new physics emergent from the 1850s became known as the Second Lord of Thermodynamics. The second law being a way of theoretically understanding the way in which heat always flows from hot to cold. Maxwell: Nature itself is fundamentally statistical, and can only be understood in a statistical way.