"It was something I first wondered when I was 12 years old: 'How does the Second Law of thermodynamics really work?' Back then I assumed that even though I didn't know, someone did. But a few years later I realized that, actually, no, it was a complicated story, that had never really been figured out.

But now, a little over 50 years after I began to think about it, I have finally come to the point where I believe I really understand the Second Law, its origin and its limitations. This book is my attempt to explain what I've figured out, how I figured it out, and how it relates to the whole 150-year history of the Second Law."

Preface

Computational Foundations for the Second Law of Thermodynamics: The Mystery of the Second Law · The Core Phenomenon of the Second Law · The Road from Ordinary Thermodynamics · Reversibility, Irreversibility and Equilibrium · Ergodicity and Global Behavior · How Random Does It Get? · The Concept of Entropy · Why the Second Law Works · Textbook Thermodynamics · Towards a Formal Proof of the Second Law · Maxwell's Demon and the Character of Observers · The Heat Death of the Universe · Traces of Initial Conditions · When the Second Law Works, and When It Doesn't · The Second Law and Order in the Universe · Class 4 and the Mechanoidal Phase · The Mechanoidal Phase and Bulk Molecular Biology · The Thermodynamics of Spacetime · Quantum Mechanics · The Future of the Second Law · Thanks & Notes

A 50-Year Quest: My Personal Journey with the Second Law of Thermodynamics: When I Was 12 Years Old… · Becoming a Physicist · Statistical Mechanics and Simple Programs · Computational Irreducibility and Rule 30 · Where Does Randomness Come From? · Hydrodynamics, and a Turbulent Tale · Getting to the Continuum · The Second Law in A New Kind of Science · The Physics Project—and the Second Law Again · Discovering Class 4 · The End of a 50-Year Journey · Appendix: The Backstory of the Book Cover That Started It All · Notes & Thanks

How Did We Get Here? The Tangled History of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: The Basic Arc of the Story · What Is Heat? · Heat Engines and the Beginnings of Thermodynamics · The Second Law Is Formulated · The Concept of Entropy · The Kinetic Theory of Gases · "Deriving" the Second Law from Molecular Dynamics · The Concept of Ergodicity · But What about Reversibility? · The Recurrence Objection · Ensembles, and an Effort to Make Things Rigorous · Maxwell's Demon · What Happened to Those People? · Coarse Graining and the "Modern Formulation" · Radiant Heat, the Second Law and Quantum Mechanics · Are Molecules Real? Continuous Versus Discrete · The Twentieth Century · What the Textbooks Said: The Evolution of Certainty · So Where Does This Leave the Second Law? · Note

Annotated Bibliography

Earlier Work

Excerpts from A New Kind of Science

Index