Lecture 5; David Albert and Tim Maudlin

Cosmology Group Podcasts

In this lecture, Tim Maudlin continues the statistical mechanical account of the velocity distribution of particles in a monatomic gas, and how this distribution evolves over time. David Albert and Tim disagree about the status of the 'Stosszahlansatz'', the assumption that the location of particles in the system, and the locations of critical regions required to impact on other particles, are statistically independent of each other. Tim argues that when an assumption of statistical independence such as this one is reached, no further explanation of the independence is required. David begins to argue that even in these cases, one must explain the independence by appealing to laws. Tim and David begin to outline their differing conceptions of laws.