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Maxwell Quotes - page 2
Maxwell... mastered electricity and magnetism, light and heat, pretty much mopping up all the major areas of physics beyond those that Newton had... taken care of-gravitation and the laws of motion. ...Maxwell detected an essential shortcoming in Newton's laws of motion, too. They worked... for macroscopic objects, like cannonballs and rocks. But what about the submicroscopic molecules from which such objects were made? ...Newton's laws ...did you no good because you could not possibly trace the motion of an individual molecule ...Maxwell applied the sort of statistical thinking that Quetelet had promoted.
James Clerk Maxwell
Maxwell... during the 1860s... showed that when the velocities reached the bell-shaped distribution, no further net change was likely. (...Ludwig Boltzmann further elaborated... and strengthened Maxwell's results). Any specific molecule would speed up or slow down, but... other molecules would change in speed to compensate. When a gas reached that state... the gas was at equilibrium. ...[T]his notion of equilibrium is precisely analogous to the Nash equilibrium in game theory. ...[J]ust as the Nash equilibrium is typically a mixed set of strategies, a gas seeks an equilibrium state with a mixed distribution of molecular velocities.
James Clerk Maxwell
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