83 - Barry Loewer: Probability, Laws of Nature, and Statistical Mechanics
Robinson's Podcast
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The Probabilistic Theory of the Universe
Maxwell and Boltzmann laid a probabilistic theory to connect up the macroscopic world with the microscopic world of Newtonian mechanics. That was not so widely accepted at the time. They had a theory which says that there's a probability distribution over all the ways particles could be laid out in space and time. Add some laws which say how those particles evolve over time. And from that, you could actually derive that if you dropped an ice cube and a pill and wore mortar in a relatively isolated room, it would be melted in 20 minutes or something like that.
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