Abstract
A SERIOUS crisis at the foundations of natural sciences has been generated recently by the astrophysical school of thought1–4 which maintains that the origin of irreversibility and all time asymmetries observed in nature can be traced back to initial conditions which gave rise to the present expansion of the universe as a whole. The astrophysical school has been considered to be in serious contradiction to the more established statistical school5 which claims that irreversibility and time asymmetries originate in the nature of macroscopic observations; that is, in the macroscopic instrument which records information and which retains a record of it. I wish to show how both schools of thought are essentially compatible with each other in particular from a cosmological viewpoint of entropy-free thermodynamics4.
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GAL-OR, B. Are the Astrophysical and Statistical Schools of Irreversibility Compatible ?. Nature 234, 217–218 (1971). https://doi.org/10.1038/234217a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/234217a0
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