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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 had been precursors of steam engines even in antiquity, but it was only in 1712 that the first practical steam engine was developed. Lazare Carnot died in 1823.

Energy 88
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Charting a Course for “Complexity”: Metamodeling, Ruliology and More

Stephen Wolfram

For three centuries theoretical models had been based on the fairly narrow set of constructs provided by mathematical equations, and particularly calculus. In a sense, the concept of taking phenomena and drilling down to find their underlying essential causes is at the heart of reductionist science.