> On Apr 6, 2017, at 12:50 PM, John Collier <colli...@ukzn.ac.za> wrote: > > SM is statistical mechanics. I don’t recall Peirce ever discussing it, though > it was well known at his time, and proven beyond a doubt with Einstein’s ex > planation of Brownian motion in 1906. Before that many French theorists > rejected it because atoms and molecules were not observables.
Ah. I should have guessed. I was reading it as Standard Model and was getting thoroughly confused. LOL. To the issue of Peirce and statistical mechanics as a foundation for thermodynamics that article by Andrew Reynolds discusses it a bit. Here’s the full reference: Reynolds, Andrew "Peirce's Cosmology and the Laws of Thermodynamics," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Vol. 32, No. 3 (Summer, 1996), pp. 403-423 He discusses Peirce’s use of Boltzman although he never mentions Gibbs who I believe is the first to coin the term statistical mechanics. While Peirce mentions Clausius that’s not really statistical. I found one other article that I’d not read before. “Peirce as a Participant in the Bohr-Einstein Discussion.” by Peder Christiansen in Charles S. Peirce and the Philosophy of Science pg 222. He argues that his five Monist papers was largely how Peirce engaged in the discussion with Boltzmann and his opponents. Although he also notes that Peirce’s papers were largely unknown by the main figures in the debate. https://books.google.com/books?id=0SV6CgAAQBAJ&pg=PA223&lpg=PA223#v=onepage&q&f=false Anyway, while he doesn’t mention it explicitly, the way Peirce discusses Boltzmann makes me think he had read "On the Relation Between the Second Law of the Mechanical Theory of Heat and the Probability Calculus with Respect to the Theorems on Thermal Equilibrium” which was Boltzmann’s statistical formulation of the second law. > I think that for some time now most physicists have agreed that order emerges > from disorder, along the lines outlined by Prigogine (he won the Nobel prize, > after all). Yes, and Peirce’s arguments are pretty similar to Prigogine’s. Prigogine as I understand it was actually fairly familiar with Peirce. Indeed he quotes Peirce on the heat death of the universe. (Going from my notes here - but it’s relevant to the current discussion) We may say that we know enough of the forces at work in the universe to know that there is none that can counteract this tendency away from every definite end but death. But although no force can counteract this tendency, chance may and will have the opposite influence. Force is in the long run dissipative; chance is in the long run concentrative. The dissipation of energy by the regular laws of nature is by those very laws accompanied by circumstances more and more favorable to its reconcentration by chance. (W 4: 551) > Entropy production is behind the formation of order; order doesn’t just > happen on its own. The chance aspects of entropy production are crucial to > the emergence of order, but the overall trend is always to increasing > disorder. Right, but it’s worth asking again about Peirce’s view of heat death here. > Personally, I think that all thirdness originates this way, through symmetry > breaking, and I wrote an article on that Information Originates in Symmetry > Breaking (1996). I did not see it as confirming Peirce’s ideas about habit > formation, and I am still very doubtful that he didn’t just goof on this > whole issue because of a lack of understanding of SM. Well my problem ultimately is over statistical mechanics and the eventual death of the universe which Peirce pretty well denies seeing it merely as an issue of heat inefficiencies which he thinks chance avoids.
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