8/22/2015

Stosszahlansatz

"Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable"
-Mark Twain
All theories of microscopic physics are governed by laws that are time reversible. Evolution of a system can be traced back into the past by the same evolution equation that governs the prediction in the future. Then the macroscopic laws arise, and we see that there is indeed something like an arrow of time, indicating that the macroscopic phenomena, unlike the microscopic ones, are not invariant under reversal of time, due to the second law of thermodynamics. In other words, both Figure 1.a and 1.b seem reasonable, whereas Figure 2.b seems quite impossible. So the natural question arises, how come the laws that govern two atoms are invariant under time reversal, i.e., Figure 1 makes sense in both directions of time, but Figure 2 doesn't?