This point tends to get obscured because, in the actual work of thermodynamics or fluid dynamics or population biology, scientists use languages that are special to their own fields, speaking of entropy or eddies or reproductive strategies and not the language of elementary particles. This is not only because we are unable to use our first principles actually to calculate complicated phenomena; it is also a reflection of the sort of question we want to ask about these phenomena. Even if we had an enormous computer that could follow the history of every elementary particle in a tidal flow or a
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