article thumbnail

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

Stephen Wolfram

He’s writing a paper, he says, basically to clarify the Second Law, (or, as he calls it, “the second fundamental theorem”—rather confidently asserting that he will “prove this theorem”): Part of the issue he’s trying to address is how the calculus is done: The partial derivative symbol ∂ had been introduced in the late 1700s.

Energy 88
article thumbnail

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 some ways, ruliology is like natural science. It’s taking the computational universe as an abstracted analog of nature, and studying how things work in it.