Laws, Chances, and Statistical Mechanics
Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 39 (4):872 (2008)
| Abstract | Statistical Mechanics (SM) involves probabilities. At the same time, most approaches to the foundations of SM—programs whose goal is to understand the macroscopic laws of thermal physics from the point of view of microphysics—are classical; they begin with the assumption that the underlying dynamical laws that govern the microscopic furniture of the world are (or can without loss of generality be treated as) deterministic. This raises some potential puzzles about the proper interpretation of these probabilities. It also raises, more generally, the question of what kinds, if any, of objective probabilities can exist in a deterministic world. | |||||||||
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