It appears to tell us that what we are looking at comes from a state that must effectively be thermal equilibrium. But what does ‘thermal equilibrium’ actually mean? I refer the reader back to Fig. 1.15, where we find the words ‘thermal equilibrium’ labelling the coarse-graining region of phase space which is (by far) the largest of all. In other words, this is the region representing maximum entropy. But we must recall the thrust of the arguments given in §1.6. These arguments told us that the whole basis of the Second Law must be explained by the fact that the initial state of the
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