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

Stephen Wolfram

And indeed particularly in chemistry and engineering it’s often been in the background, justifying all the computations routinely done using entropy. There’s lots of rhetoric: The applicability of the calculus of probabilities to a particular case can of course never be proved with precision.

Energy 88
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Remembering the Improbable Life of Ed Fredkin (1934–2023) and His World of Ideas and Stories

Stephen Wolfram

It didn’t help that his knowledge of physics was at best spotty (and, for example, I don’t think he ever really learned calculus). In 2015 Ed told me a nice story about his time at Caltech: In 1952–53, I was a student in Linus Pauling’s class where he lectured Freshman Chemistry at Caltech.