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

Stephen Wolfram

Already the steam-engine works our mines, impels our ships, excavates our ports and our rivers, forges iron, fashions wood, grinds grain, spins and weaves our cloths, transports the heaviest burdens, etc. He introduced the Boltzmann Transport Equation which allows one to compute at least certain non-equilibrium properties of gases.

Energy 88
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Computational Foundations for the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Stephen Wolfram

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. That anything like this makes sense depends, however, yet again on “perfect randomness as far as the observer is concerned”.

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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 121