The Centre for Time at the University of Sydney is pleased to announce the commencement of a new seminar series on philosophical and foundational issues in physics.
The seminars will be held every second Wednesday, beginning next Wednesday the 13th of May, in the philosophy common room at the University of Sydney from 11:30am to 1pm. The room is located in the philosophy department in the Main Quad building (a map can be found at http://db.auth.usyd.edu.au/directories/map/largemap00a.html). The format of the session will mimic that of Monday's current projects seminars: a 30-35 minute talk + 55-60 minutes of discussion time. The first session next Wednesday the 13th of May will feature Roman Frigg presenting a talk entitled "Typicality and the Approach to Equilibrium in Boltzmannian Statistical Mechanics." Abstract: Systems prepared in a non-equilibrium state approach, and eventually reach, equilibrium. Why do they do so? An important contemporary version of the Boltzmannian approach to statistical mechanics, due to Lebowitz and Goldstein, answers this question in terms of typicality. However, as formulated, this approach is unsuccessful. I briefly indicate why this is so. The main part of the the talk aims to formulate a positive thesis. I first give an alternative formulation of typicality. This condition differs from Lebowitz and Goldstein's formulations in that it explicitly builds requirements on the Hamiltonian of a system into the condition. I then argue that almost all (in a topological sense) systems satisfy the relevant typicality condition (KAM tori and other complications notwithstanding). Furthermore this condition is all that we need to explain the approach to equilibrium. Calls are now open to anybody wishing to present at these sessions. Enquiries can be made to myself at [email protected]. Those who wish to continue receiving notices about this seminar series will need to sign up to the SydFoP mailing list. To sign up to the list, please go to: http://lists.arts.usyd.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/sydfop. Hope to see you all next Wednesday, Pete --- Peter Evans Centre for Time University of Sydney
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