Category: Statistical Mechanics
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Three pieces – and some puzzles
I just finished a bit of summer reading – in particular, three books with very similar scope. The first is by a well-known physical chemist and author – it is called “Four Laws that drive the Universe“. The second is by a well-known quantum information expert, and called “Decoding reality:…
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The Normal Distribution is AbNormal
I gave a talk on this topic exactly two years ago at my undergraduate institution, the Indian Institute of Technology, in Chennai (India). The speech is here, with the powerpoint presentation accompanying it The Normal Distribution is Abnormal And Other Oddities. The general import of the speech was that the…
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Master Traders and Bayes’ theorem
Imagine you were walking around in Manhattan and you chanced upon an interesting game going on at the side of the road. By the way, when you see these games going on, a safe strategy is to walk on, since they usually reduce to methods of separating a lot of…
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A simple connection between Entropy and Information
This article follows a simple example laid out by Jaynes (1996). Jaynes’ example is one that shows how one’s computation of the change in entropy in a physical / chemical process depends on the precise variables that one uses to label the macro state. If you use different variables (say…
Simply Curious 