The History of Probability and Laws

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It wasn't until Boltzmann and Maxwell brought probability and laws together that they unified them. I'm not up enough on the history to really understand the context of what they had previously thought before they were faced with statistical mechanics, right? So I don't have an informed opinion about where they were going. If there's someone listening to your podcasts who takes me up on this, I think it's a great thing. And they could write in the introduction to their book that they heard about this doing this from me. Love that.

The founders of statistical mechanics in the 19th century faced an uphill battle to convince their fellow physicists that the laws of thermodynamics could be derived from the random motions of microscopic atoms. This insight turns out to be even more important than they realized: the emergence of patterns characterizing our macroscopic world relies crucially on the increase of entropy over time. Barry Loewer has (in collaboration with David Albert) been developing a theory of the Mentaculus — the probability map of the world — that connects microscopic physics to time, causation, and other familiar features of our experience.

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Barry Loewer received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University. He is currently distinguished professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. His research focuses on the foundations of physics and the metaphysics of laws and chance.

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