Is ergodicity a reasonable hypothesis?
Statistical Mechanics
2014-01-29 v1 Chemical Physics
History and Philosophy of Physics
Abstract
In the physics literature "ergodicity" is taken to mean that a system, including a macroscopic one, visits all microscopic states in a relatively short time. We show that this is an impossibility even if that time is billions of years. We also suggest that this feature does not contradict most physical considerations since those considerations deal with correlations of only a few particles.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1401.7224,
title = {Is ergodicity a reasonable hypothesis?},
author = {Bernard Gaveau and Lawrence S. Schulman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1401.7224},
year = {2014}
}