[PhilPhys] 15 avril, seminaire LARSIM, philosophie de la mecanique statistique (deux conferences)

[GRINBAUM Alexei]

Seminaire LARSIM 

Fondements et philosophie de la mécanique statistique

Lieu: CEA-Orme des Merisiers, bât. 774, salle 50

15 avril, 11h
Kevin Davey (University of Chicago) 

"What is Gibbs's canonical distribution?"
Although the canonical distribution is one the central tools of statistical mechanics, the reason for its effectiveness is poorly understood. This is due in part to the fact that there is no clear consensus on what it means to use the canonical distribution to describe a system in equilibrium with a heat bath. In this talk, I examine some traditional views as to what sort of thing we should take the canonical distribution to be. I argue that thinking of the canonical distribution as a time ensemble of sorts has a number of advantages that rival interpretations lack.


15 avril, 14h30
Daniel Parker (Virginia Tech) 

"Molecular disorder and probability"
This paper offers a new perspective on Boltzmann's replies to the Loschmidt reversibility objection that draws on Boltzmann's notion of molecular disorder, as presented in his Lectures on Gas Theory. Rather than adopting the assumption of molecular chaos or Stosszahlansatz, I offer the hypothesis of disorder, which takes into account changes in molecular-disordering upon dynamical evolution, and is suggested as a precondition for the application of the laws of probability to gas systems. This hypothesis can hold asymmetrically in time, unlike the notion of molecular disorder that is a claim about the instantaneous state of a system. This proposal is further investigated by simulations of the Kac ring model.
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