“How did you do it?” Szilard began explaining. “Five or ten minutes” later, he says, Einstein understood. After only a year of university physics, Szilard had worked out a rigorous mathematical proof that the random motion of thermal equilibrium could be fitted within the framework of the phenomenological theory in its original, classical form, without reference to a limiting atomic model—“and [Einstein] liked this very much.” Thus emboldened, Szilard took his paper—its title would be “On the extension of phenomenological thermodynamics to fluctuation phenomena”—to von Laue, who received it
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