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Lumifer comments on Entropy and Temperature - Less Wrong Discussion

26 Post author: spxtr 17 December 2014 08:04AM

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Comment author: Lumifer 18 December 2014 05:05:20PM 1 point [-]

Yes, future is uncertain but past is already fixed and certain. So? We are not talking about probabilities of something happening in the past. The topic of the discussion is how temperature (and/or probabilities) are "in the mind" and what does that mean.

Comment author: DanielLC 18 December 2014 07:01:51PM -1 points [-]

The past is certain but the future is not. But the only difference between the two is when you are in relation to them. It's not as if certain time periods are inherently past or future.

An example of temperature being in the mind that's theoretically possible to set up but you'd never manage in practice is Maxwell's demon. If you already know where all of the particles of gas are and how they're bouncing, you could make it so all the fast ones end up in one chamber and all the slow ones end up in the other. Or you can just get all of the molecules into the same chamber. You can do this with an arbitrarily small amount of energy.