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Can Conditioning on the “Past Hypothesis” Militate Against the Reversibility Objections?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Abstract
In his recent book, Time and Chance, David Albert claims that by positing that there is a uniform probability distribution defined, on the standard measure, over the space of microscopic states that are compatible with both the current macrocondition of the world, and with what he calls the “past hypothesis”, we can explain the time asymmetry of all of the thermodynamic behavior in the world. The principal purpose of this paper is to dispute this claim. I argue that Albert's proposal fails in his stated goal—to show how to use the time-reversible dynamics of Newtonian physics to “underwrite the actual content of our thermodynamic experience” (Albert 2000, 159). Albert's proposal can satisfactorily explain why the overall entropy of the universe as a whole is increasing, but it does not and cannot explain the increasing entropy of relatively small, relatively short-lived systems in energetic isolation without making use of a principle that leads to reversibility objections.
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- Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association
Footnotes
I thank Mathias Frisch, Paul Teller, David Albert and three anonymous reviewers for helpful discussions, comments, and criticisms. Special thanks to Bailey Quillen of the Pinellas County Center for the Arts at Gibbs High School, Florida, for help with the illustrations.
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