[HN Gopher] A 50-Year Quest: My Personal Journey with the Second...
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A 50-Year Quest: My Personal Journey with the Second Law of
Thermodynamics
Author : yarapavan
Score : 45 points
Date : 2023-02-03 07:58 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
| fsckboy wrote:
| this link is
|
| > _part 2 in a 3-part series about the Second Law:_
|
| > _1. Computational Foundations for the Second Law of
| Thermodynamics_
|
| > _2. A 50-Year Quest: My Personal Journey with the Second Law of
| Thermodynamics_
|
| > _3. How Did We Get Here? The Tangled History of the Second Law
| of Thermodynamics_
|
| conundrum:
|
| 1. can i win by starting with part 2?
|
| 2. will I have a better chance of breaking even if I start with
| part 1?
|
| https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/computational-fo...
|
| 3. do I have to read part 3?
|
| time to find out...
| ur-whale wrote:
| You could help everyone else win by letting us know of your
| findings.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| It sounds like you already know the answer!
|
| You can't win. You can't break even. And you can't get out of
| the game.
| onos wrote:
| I don't follow everything he figured out / discussed here. But
| the man is definitely a genius, and through Mathematica alone has
| had an immense impact on science. Appreciate the link, it was
| refreshing to read a bit of his life.
| boole1854 wrote:
| I would recommend starting with Part 1, rather than Part 2 (which
| was linked). Here is Part 1:
| https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/computational-fo...
|
| Wolfram's ability to create interesting visualizations is
| fantastic. But I seem to feel underwhelmed at the significance of
| his discovery.
|
| In short, he says that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a
| consequence of the fact that we as observers are computationally
| bounded and cannot perceive all the details in the the lower-
| level, computationally irreducible physical systems around us.
|
| Yet this does not seem enormously different, or perhaps not
| different at all, than the standard account in statistical
| mechanics in which the observer is considered to be coarse-
| graining over the fine details of the system which are too
| complex to track.
|
| What is new in Wolfram's approach other than using computation-
| related labels to describe the situation? For example, his
| 'computationally bounded' observer is just the standard 'coarse-
| graining', right?
| dkural wrote:
| You are right. There is nothing new here.
| smohare wrote:
| [dead]
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(page generated 2023-02-04 23:00 UTC)