Philosophy of Statistical Mechanics from an Emergentist Viewpoint - a podcast by MCMP Team

David Wallace (Balliol College) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (15 April, 2015) titled "Philosophy of Statistical Mechanics from an Emergentist Viewpoint". Abstract: I sketch a view of the philosophy of statistical mechanics as (a) concerned primarily with the interrelations between different dynamical systems describing more or less coarse-grained degrees of freedom of a system, and only secondarily with thermodynamic notions like equilibrium and entropy, and (b) informed by developments in contemporary mainstream physics. I develop, as concrete examples, (i) the projection-based approach to kinetic equations developed in the 1970s by Balescu, Prigogine, Zwanzig et al, and (ii) the relevance of quantum mechanics to nominally “classical” systems like the ideal gas.

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