Quotes About Boltzmann

This is a great theme. Boltzmann, writing in 1886 on the second law of thermodynamics, declared that available energy was the main object at stake in the struggle for existence and the evolution of the world.

On one assessment there should be no doubt: Newton was the greatest creative genius physics has ever seen. None of the other candidates for the superlative (Einstein, Maxwell, Boltzmann, Gibbs, and Feynman) has matched Newton's combined achievements as theoretician, experimentalist, and mathematician.

entropy taken with a negative sign', which by the way is not my invention. It happens to be precisely the thing on which Boltzmann's original argument turned.

Boltzmann's equation is well illustrated by that example. The gradual 'spreading out' of the sugar over all the water available increases the disorder D), and hence (since the logarithm of D increases with D) the entropy.

Condon, quick on his feet, replied that the accusation was untrue. He was not a revolutionary in physics. He raised his right hand: "I believe in Archimedes' Principle, formulated in the third century B.C. I believe in Kepler's laws of planetary motion, discovered in the seventeenth century. I believe in Newton's laws.…" And on he went, invoking the illustrious names of Bernoulli, Fourier, Ampère, Boltzmann, and Maxwell.

In 1877 he published his paper "Probabilistic foundations of heat theory", in which he formulated what Einstein later called the Boltzmann principle; the interpretation of the concept of entropy as a mathematically well-defined measure of what one can call the "disorder" of atoms, which had already appeared in his work of 1872, is here extended and becomes a general statement.

The night of his birth marked the passage from Shrove Tuesday to Ash Wednesday and Boltzmann used to say that his birth date explained why his temper could suddenly change from great happiness to deep depression.

In the same paper Boltzmann was able to derive a proof of the irreversibility of macroscopic phenomena. It is the difference of scale between the objects that we observe in everyday life on the one hand, and molecules on the other hand, which explains this irreversibility through the laws of probability.

What we can do is to establish a bridge between the various levels in order to form a coherent picture; the whole of Boltzmann's work is a masterpiece of this procedure, i.e. how to construct, starting from atoms, a description that explains everyday life.

This is what Boltzmann understood. The difference between past and future does not lie in the elementary laws of motion; it does not reside in the deep grammar of nature. It is the natural disordering that leads to gradually less particular, less special situations.

This is the disconcerting conclusion that emerges from Boltzmann's work: the difference between the past and the future refers only to our own blurred vision of the world. It's a conclusion that leaves us flabbergasted: Is it really possible that a perception so vivid, basic, existential—my perception of the passage of time—depends on the fact that I cannot apprehend the world in all of its minute detail?

Later on, I will delve into the mystery of this blurring, to see how it is tied to the strange initial improbability of the universe. For now, I will end with the mind-boggling fact that entropy, as Boltzmann fully understood, is nothing other than the number of microscopic states that our blurred vision of the world fails to distinguish.

Time has lost another of its crucial components: the intrinsic difference between past and future. Boltzmann understood that there is nothing intrinsic about the flowing of time. That it is only the blurred reflection of a mysterious improbability of the universe at a point in the past. The source of Rilke's "eternal current" is nothing other than this.

The growth of entropy is nothing other than the ubiquitous and familiar natural increase of disorder. This is what Boltzmann understood.

Looking at the sun going down, the eye of Copernicus had seen the world turning. Looking at a glass of still water, the eyes of Boltzmann saw atoms and molecules frenziedly moving

Boltzmann was not taken seriously. At the age of fifty-six, in Duino, near Trieste, he committed suicide. Today he is considered one of the geniuses of physics.

entropy, as Boltzmann fully understood, is nothing other than the number of microscopic states that our blurred vision of the world fails to distinguish.

If the cosmos isn't finite, then far, far away, floating duplicates of your brain - with all its experiences, thoughts, and emotions - are occasionally (and temporarily) thrown together by the random combining of atoms. Such 'Boltzmann brains,' as they're called, are a disturbing consequence of an unlimited universe.