Arieh Ben-Naim
More books by Arieh Ben-Naim…
“In the over-a-hundred-years of the history of the Second Law, people were puzzled by the apparent conflict between the reversibility of the equations of motion, and the irreversibility associated with the Second Law. Boltzmann was the first to attempt to derive the Second Law from the dynamics of the particles. In my opinion, this, as well as other attempts, will inevitably fail in principle. First, because it is impractical to solve the equations of motion for some 1023 particles. Second, because one cannot get probabilities from the deterministic equations of motion. Third, and perhaps most important, because of the indistinguishability of the particles. It is well known that whenever we write the equation of motions of any number of particles, we must first label the particles. This is true for classical as well as for the quantum mechanical equations of motion. However, the very act of labeling the particles violates the principle of ID of the particles.”
― Farewell To Entropy, A: Statistical Thermodynamics Based On Information
― Farewell To Entropy, A: Statistical Thermodynamics Based On Information
“What's in a name? In the case of Shannon's measure the naming was not accidental. In 1961 one of us (Tribus) asked Shannon what he had thought about when he had finally confirmed his famous measure. Shannon replied: “My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it ‘information,’ but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it ‘uncertainty.’ When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, ‘You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name. In the second place, and more important, no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.”
― Farewell To Entropy, A: Statistical Thermodynamics Based On Information
― Farewell To Entropy, A: Statistical Thermodynamics Based On Information
“Notwithstanding our inability to define time, we are all conscious of its existence, its presence, and its apparent flow. This is strange because time is not perceived with any of our senses; we do not hear, see, smell, taste, or touch time, yet we say that we feel it. Is there a special time-sense?”
― Time for Everyone And Time for Everything
― Time for Everyone And Time for Everything
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