Ludwig Boltzmann

Marco Dalla Gasperina points out that the nothing can be defeated with the help of the luck dragon.

Is that a metaphor for quantum fluctuations in impossibly distant futures spontaneously generating a new Big Bang by pure chance? Or do you mean that while we're waiting through the infinite future for a new Big Bang, quantum fluctuations will produce all sorts of weird things first, like Boltzmann brains and Falcor? Valid point.

Maybe Artax will come back too.

I hope so.

I mean, these are not 100% proof.

There could be, you know, Boltzmann's brains or whatever, suddenly.

popping into existence.

So I think it's a window into a way of thinking that just needs to be more specified as people have the diverse views.

You're right that it's a rare, um, situation among current theoretical physicists.

Uh, I would say if you, uh, if you take away the current and if you look more widely and you look at the great, uh, physicists, in fact, the great scientists of the world, uh, then the sentence become totally wrong, right? Uh, if you think about, uh, Einstein or Maxwell or Boltzmann or Newton or, or Darwin, uh, let's get out of physics, uh, uh, and so many other major, uh, thinkers, uh, in, in strictly scientific disciplines, uh, uh, the first thing you are very surprised is that they're enormously interested in philosophy.

Uh, I, I, I, I don't wanna go as far as say all of them because that... certainly you can find some that are completely technical and totally disi- non-interested in philosophy or even, uh, coming out with, uh, strongly disparaging comments on philosophy like Hawking, uh, Stephen Hawking, who, who, who said philosophy's dead because now we have science.

Uh, but, but I think that's, uh, plain nonsense.

Daryl Cutting asks a priority question.

You recently discussed how the theory of Boltzmann brains is causing some concern in theoretical cosmological physics today.

I do have difficulty in conceiving how such objects could be amassed materially from the increasingly diffuse atoms in the effectively infinite future.

Dark energy is causing acceleration of the expansion of the universe.

Isn't it possible that the reduction in matter density will be fast enough to outstrip any possible clumping of a complex random fluctuation such as a macroscopic brain, which requires actual atoms whose protons have not yet been decayed even given infinite time? Well, that would be completely true if the world were classical, but the world is quantum mechanical, and that changes things.

The point of, um, the Boltzmann brain problem is, you know, it didn't become a problem until we discovered the cosmological constant in 1998, until we discovered the acceleration of the universe.

And again, it still is only a problem if it truly is a cosmological constant.

If it's gonna be a temporary dark energy that decays away, then the Boltzmann brain problem goes away b- basically because the universe doesn't accelerate forever.

In the weeks that followed, Planck worked to find a theoretical foundation for his formula.

He employed the methods of statistical mechanics, the powerful framework developed by Ludwig Boltzmann that described the behavior of matter in terms of probability and large numbers of particles.

Planck had to count the possible ways that energy could be distributed among the oscillators in his theoretical blackbody, the tiny charged particles in the walls that absorbed and emitted radiation.

And here, to make the mathematics work, Planck did something strange.

In the interests of clearness it appeared to me inevitable that I should repeat myself frequently without paying the slightest attention to the elegance of the presentation.

I adhered scrupulously to the precept of that brilliant theoretical physicist L. Boltzmann, according to whom matters of elegance ought to be left to the tailor and to the cobbler.

I make no pretense of having withheld from the reader difficulties which are inherent to the subject.

On the other hand, I have purposely treated the empirical physical foundations of the theory in a stepmotherly fashion so that readers unfamiliar with physics may not feel like the wanderer who was unable to see the forest for the trees.

The assumption that this velocity of propagation is dependent on the direction in space is in itself improbable.

In short, let us assume that the simple law of the constancy of the velocity of light c in vacuum is justifiably believed by the child at school.

Who would imagine that this simple law has plunged the conscientiously thoughtful physicist into the greatest intellectual difficulties? Let us consider how these difficulties arise.

Of course, we must refer the process of the propagation of light, and indeed every other process, to a rigid reference body, coordinate system.