Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

by Brian Greene

The organization of particles into groups of look-alikes provides an extraordinarily powerful schema. Just as randomly tossed pennies are more likely to belong to a group with greater membership (with higher entropy), so too for randomly bouncing particles. The realization is as straightforward as its implications are far-reaching: Whether the bouncing particles are in a steam engine, in your room, or anywhere else, by understanding the typical features of the most commonplace configurations (those that belong to the groupings with the greatest membership), we can make predictions about the system’s macroscopic qualities—the very qualities we care about. These are statistical predictions, to be sure, but ones with a fantastically high probability of being accurate. And the kicker is that we achieve all this while avoiding the insurmountable complexity of analyzing the trajectories of an absurdly large number of particles.