Lawrence Sklar offers a comprehensive, non-technical introduction to statistical mechanics and attempts to understand its foundational elements.

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students.

This selection of reviews and papers is intended to stimulate renewed reflection on the fundamental and practical aspects of probability in physics. While putting emphasis on conceptual aspects in the foundations of statistical and quantum mechanics, the book deals with the philosophy of probability in its interrelation with mathematics and physics in general. Addressing graduate students and researchers in physics and mathematics togehter with philosophers of science, the contributions avoid cumbersome technicalities in order to make the book worthwhile reading for nonspecialists and specialists alike.

In this classic, David Bohm was the first to offer us his causal interpretation of the quantum theory. Causality and Chance in Modern Physics continues to make possible further insight into the meaning of the quantum theory and to suggest ways of extending the theory into new directions.

A most systematic study of how to interpret probabilistic assertions in the context of statistical mechanics.

Chance is uncanny to us. We thought it didn't exist, that God or a reasonable explanation was behind everything. But we know today: It exists. We know that much of what surrounds us and which we do not see through, nevertheless runs causally. Unlike what was thought in the days of the Enlightenment, chance is the rule around us rather than lawful order. The clouds are stochastic fractals, the waves on the sea are pure random machinery. The philosopher Charles Peirce recognized the fundamental importance of chance in precisely this sense, even before quantum and chaos theory, and gave the doctrine its name: Tychism. Without chance there would be nothing new, no life, no creativity, no history. This book looks at chance from the perspective of physics, computer science, and philosophy. It spans from antiquity to quantum physics and shows that chance is firmly built into the world and that it would not exist without chance. This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Der Zufall in Physik, Informatik und Philosophie by Walter Hehl, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature in 2021. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.

A practical introduction to the use of probability and statistics in experimental physics for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Intended as a practical guide, and not as a comprehensive text, the emphasis is on applications and understanding, on theorems and techniques that are actually used in experimental physics. Proofs of theorems are generally omitted unless they contribute to the intuition in understanding and applying the theorem. The problems, many with worked solutions, introduce the student to the use of computers; occasional reference is made to some of the Fortran routines available in the CERN library, but other systems, such as Maple, will also be useful.