One of the most important, yet least understood, concepts in all of physics. Head to https://brilliant.org/veritasium to start your free 30-day trial, and th...
Ok… the first half of the video was about the ergodic hypothesis but for me talking about a “most likely state” instead of “that all accessible microstates are equiprobable over a long period of time” is a huge miss-conception, not saying wrong
The “state” in “most likely state” refers to a macro state, which in the “packets of energy” example is specified by the pair (left total energy, right total energy). A macro state with more microscopic realizations (hence more likely – all microstates of the same energy being equally likely) has higher entropy by definition. The video could perhaps make the distinction between micro- and macro-states more clear, but doesn’t seem like a misconception
Ok… the first half of the video was about the ergodic hypothesis but for me talking about a “most likely state” instead of “that all accessible microstates are equiprobable over a long period of time” is a huge miss-conception, not saying wrong
But with this in mind its indeed a great video…
The “state” in “most likely state” refers to a macro state, which in the “packets of energy” example is specified by the pair
(left total energy, right total energy). A macro state with more microscopic realizations (hence more likely – all microstates of the same energy being equally likely) has higher entropy by definition. The video could perhaps make the distinction between micro- and macro-states more clear, but doesn’t seem like a misconceptionOh… Of course😯…when putting it that way… thanks a lot for this insight