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tion between thermodynamics and dynamics. Even now, a
hundred and fifty years after Clausius, the question still
arouses strong feelings. No one can remain neutral in this conflict,
which involves the meaning of reality and time. Must
dynamics, the mother of modern science, be abandoned in
favor of some form of thermodynamics? That was the view of
the "energeticists," who exerted great influence during the
nineteenth century. Is there a way to "save" dynamics, to recoup
the second law without giving up the formidable structure
built by Newton and his successors? What role can
entropy play in a world described by dynamics?
We have already mentioned the answer proposed by Boltzmann.
Boltzmann's famous equation S = k log P relates entropy
and probability: entropy grows because probability grows.
Let us immediately emphasize that in this perspective the second
law would have great practical importance but would be of
no fundamental significance. In his excellent book The Ambidextrous
Universe, Martin Gardner writes: "Certain events go
only one way not because they can't go the other way but because
it is extremely unlikely that they go backward. "3 By improving
our abilities to measure less and less unlikely events,
we could reach a situation in which the second law would play
as small a role as we want. This is the point of view that is
often taken today. However, this was not Planck's point of
view:
It would be absurd to assume that the validity of the second
law depends in any way on the skill of the physicist
or chemist in observing or experimenting. The gist of the
second law has nothing to do with experiment; the law
asserts briefly that there exists in nature a quantity which
changes always in the same sense in all natural processes.
The proposition stated in this general form may
be correct or incorrect; but whichever it may be, it will
remain so, irrespective of whether thinking and measuring
beings exist on the earth or not, and whether or not,
assuming they do exist, they are able to measure the details
of physical or chemical processes more accurately
by one, two, or a hundred decimal places than we can.
The limitation to the law, if any, must lie in the same
province as its essential idea, in the observed Nature, and