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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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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”. But there’s really just one principle that governs all these things: that whatever method we have to prepare or analyze states of a system is somehow computationally bounded. Why does the Second Law work?

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The Concept of the Ruliad

Stephen Wolfram

For integers, the obvious notion of equivalence is numerical equality. And just like the speed of light governs the maximum rate at which effects can propagate in physical space, so similarly in our models there’s a “ maximum entanglement speed ” at which effects can propagate in branchial space. For hypergraphs, it’s isomorphism.

Physics 122