Wayne Myrvold (The University of Western Ontario)
Two prima facie puzzling phenomena are the existence of relatively autonomous laws for the evolution of macroscopic variables, which permit us to disregard details of the microstate, and dissipative, irreversible behaviour of the macrostate. In this talk I will examine how these phenomena arise in the context of the theory of open quantum systems, with an aim to suggesting answers to what Zwanzig has called “the essential mystery of statistical mechanics”: why do such models work in the first place?
