The End of Certainty, by Ilya Prigogine

August 06, 2014

As far as I could gather, the book was saying something like… "our model of physics is an approximation of the real world anyway. The laws we normally write down are good approximations when N is small, but not when N is large in which regime the continuous density solutions are a better model."

This is analogous to how Newton's gravity is a good approximation for low energy scales but not for higher energy scales when you have to replace it with something else totally different. In the case of thermodynamics, you don't have to replace it with something totally different, just quite different."

The guy did win a nobel prize so I am sure he's on to something but the book had so few details mathematically that I couldn't get much more than that summary out of it. Makes me want to read something more technical by him though, for sure.