David Albert, University of Washington
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Kane Hall Walker-Ames Room
Philosophy of Physics
It seems to us that by acting now we can affect the future, but not the past. I will describe some recent work on the foundations of statistical mechanics which seeks to understand this phenomenon not as a part of the fundamental metaphysical structure of the world, but (rather) as a mechanical phenomenon of nature - like (say) the law of universal gravitation, or the second law of thermodynamics.