Talk:Molecular chaos

Things I might get around to doing soon

Two excellent reference on the role of the hypothesis of molecular chaos in the question of Loschmidt's paradox are Jan von Plato, Creating Modern Probability, Cambridge, 1994, and James H. Jeans, The Dynamical Theory of Gases, 4th ed., Cambridge, 1925. But the last paragraph of this article is incorrect. On a phase-space average basis, the correlations cancel out and the H-theorem really does follow. But it cannot apply to an individual trajectory, so it does not in fact imply irreversibility of any individual system and individual set of initial conditions. 98.109.241.146 (talk) 02:14, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

Last sentence of second paragraph

"The resolution (1895) of this paradox is that the velocities of two particles after a collision are no longer truly uncorrelated. By asserting that it was acceptable to ignore these correlations in the population at times after the initial time, Boltzmann had introduced an element of time asymmetry through the formalism of his calculation."

This may need to be rephrased, it states "The resolution (1895) of this paradox... By asserting that it was acceptable to ignore these correlations", you cannot resolve a paradox simply by 'asserting' that something is true. Doing so is only useful to pin down what is causing the paradox in the first place, i.e. 'that velocities of two particles after a collision are no longer truly uncorrelated' would be a sufficient condition for the time asymmetry to follow. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 136.186.248.251 (talk) 06:22, 15 December 2021 (UTC)