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

Stephen Wolfram

It began partly as an empirical law, and partly as something abstractly constructed on the basis of the idea of molecules, that nobody at the time knew for sure existed. And indeed particularly in chemistry and engineering it’s often been in the background, justifying all the computations routinely done using entropy.

Energy 88
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A 50-Year Quest: My Personal Journey with the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Stephen Wolfram

One of the key things that had originally let me start “scientifically investigating” cellular automata is that out of all the infinite number of possible constructible rules, I’d picked a modest number on which I could do exhaustive experiments. Of course, as is typical in the history of ideas, there’s more to the story.

Physics 95