The Man Who Counted the Ways
No coin aims for fifty heads, yet almost every way a hundred coins can land comes out near it. Ludwig Boltzmann used that kind of counting to explain why heat flows one way. The count explains why a mixed room stays mixed. The strongest objection to it is one he saw himself: it can’t explain why the room started unmixed.
Does A Black Hole Destroy Information?
It depends on what the word means. Information can be news, a count of yes-or-no answers, the stuff the world is made of, or the subject of a fifty-year argument. A new philosophy paper uses a 2007 thought experiment, in which a black hole hands back a diary like a mirror, to sort them out.