On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 8:07 AM, Terren Suydam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > By the way, just wanted to point out a beautifully simple example - perhaps > the simplest - of an irreducibility in complex systems. > > Individual molecular interactions are symmetric in time, they work the same > forwards and backwards. Yet diffusion, which is nothing more than the > aggregate of molecular interactions, is asymmetric. Figure that one out. > This is just statistical mechanics. The interesting thing is that we make an opportunistic assumption, that any colliding particles are independent before collision (this introduces the time arrow), which is then empirically "confirmed" by the fact that derived properties agree with the "phenomenological" theory of entropy.
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