You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Epictetus comments on Open Thread, Feb. 2 - Feb 8, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Gondolinian 02 February 2015 12:28AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (253)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Epictetus 10 February 2015 09:45:33PM 0 points [-]

The lesson is that statistical methods are superfluous if you know everything with certainty. It's worth noting that classical mechanics is completely symmetric with respect to time (does not have a distinguished "arrow of time"), whereas thermodynamics has a definite arrow of time. You run into problems if you assume that everything behaves classically and try to apply thermodynamic notions.

Landau and Lifshitz's Statistical Physics has some discussion of issues with entropy.

Comment author: passive_fist 10 February 2015 10:03:53PM 0 points [-]

I understand what you're saying and I agree. Though it's worth mentioning that the 'arrow of time' in thermodynamics actually doesn't exist for closed, reversible systems.