From: "jeffrey E." <jeevacation®gmail.com> To: Misha Gromov Subject: Re: I m around until wed if you want to talk more about sense making Date: Sat, 11 Jul 2015 20:36:55 +0000 Grothendieck s writings have kept me amused, but im not sure what ideas you found most appealing On Sat, Jul 11, 2015 at 2:55 PM, Misha Gromov < > wrote: This is, certainly, correct Jeffry,what you say. But apparently there is no effective formalism to express it (semi)quantitatively and/or to prove that the systems do behave the way they do. m. On Mon, 6 Jul 2015 11:12:35 +0200, jeffrey E. wrote: Your question about entropy is an important one. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that systems go to states of high entropy where events are random and uncorrelated, so that thermal fluctuations appear to be statistically independent. However, if you look under the hood of the second law, you find that what is really going on is that the dynamics that leads you to this high entropy state is actually generating huge amounts of correlations between the different parts of the system. In fact, the apparently random and independent fluctuations of the parts reflect large correlations with the other parts of the system. But these correlations are effectively smeared out over the whole system: to reveal the fact that they are not truly independent, one would have to make measurements on all the parts together, and tease out the extensive but subtle correlations between them. For example, even though the apparent high entropy of a gas of molecules reflects all the correlations that are generated by the collisions of molecules over time, if one looks at just two molecules in the gas, their motions will be statistically independent to a high degree of accuracy. please note The information contained in this communication is confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may constitute inside information, and is intended only for the use of the addressee. It is the proper