Dear all, The CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) seminar series continues this Wednesday, 21 November, 1-2:30pm in HPS Seminar Room 2. Giovanni Valente (University of Pittsburgh) will give a talk entitled "Lanford's theorem and the emergence of irreversibility". The abstract is below.
All are very welcome, and we hope to see many of you there. Best wishes, Vashka -- It has been a longstanding problem to show how the irreversible behaviour of macroscopic systems can be reconciled with the time-reversal invariance of these same systems when considered from a microscopic point of view. A result by Lanford (1975, 1976, 1981) shows that, under certain conditions, the famous Boltzmann equation, describing the irreversible behaviour of a dilute gas, can be obtained from the time-reversal invariant Hamiltonian equations of motion for the hard spheres model. In this talk, which is based on a joint work with Jos Uffink, I examine how and in what sense Lanford's theorem succeeds in deriving this remarkable result. Many authors have expressed different views on the question which of the ingredients in the theorem is the source of irreversibility. I claim that all such interpretations miss the target and I suggest an alternative solution to the problem of the emergence of irreversibility in Lanford's theorem. _____________________________________________________ Sent by the CamPhilEvents mailing list. To unsubscribe or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents Posts are archived here: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive
