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How Did We Get Here? The Tangled History of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Stephen Wolfram

But in 1798 Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) (1753–1814) measured the heat produced by the mechanical process of boring a cannon, and began to make the argument that, in contradiction to the caloric theory, there was actually some kind of correspondence between mechanical energy and amount of heat.

Energy 88
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The Physicalization of Metamathematics and Its Implications for the Foundations of Mathematics

Stephen Wolfram

One can view a symbolic expression such as f[g[x][y, h[z]], w] as a hierarchical or tree structure , in which at every level some particular “head” (like f ) is “applied to” one or more arguments. and at t steps gives a total number of rules equal to: &#10005. which we can read as “there exists something a for which equals a ”.

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Computational Foundations for the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Stephen Wolfram

Sometimes textbooks will gloss over everything; sometimes they’ll give some kind of “common-sense-but-outside-of-physics argument”. Once one has the idea of “equilibrium”, one can then start to think of its properties as purely being functions of certain parameters—and this opens up all sorts of calculus-based mathematical opportunities.

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The Concept of the Ruliad

Stephen Wolfram

For integers, the obvious notion of equivalence is numerical equality. The global structures of metamathematics , economics , linguistics and evolutionary biology seem likely to provide examples—and in each case we can expect that at the core is the ruliad, with its unique structure. For hypergraphs, it’s isomorphism.

Physics 122