Time and Chance by David Albert, Harvard University Press, $20.50,
ISBN 0674003179
IF YOU see a half-melted ice cube sitting in a puddle of water, it’s a safe
bet that it will be more melted in a few minutes’ time. You can also be fairly
sure that the ice cube was frozen solid not so long ago. One of the triumphs of
19th-century physics, mainly due to Ludwig Boltzmann and J. Willard Gibbs, was
linking elementary, macroscopic observations such as these to the microscopic
point of view, the behaviour of atoms and molecules. It’s impossible to know the
exact disposition…
