Rare Events : Are Outliers Negligible ?
Résumé
The question of time’s direction has sparked endless debates and will likely continue to do so. More precisely, its link to thermodynamic irreversibility deserves close scrutiny. Although time isn’t explicitly part of thermodynamics’ laws, the second law states that every process must increase global entropy. Jill North explains that in a system like a gas of randomly distributed particles— macroscopically described via Boltzmann’s statistical framework—extreme fluctuation domains can show localized entropy decreases, even as the system’s overall entropy rises. Thus, time’s evolution toward higher entropy doesn’t rule out regions of major deviations where disorder (entropy) is greatly reduced.
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Cite hal-05521696v1 Preprint Olivier Sire. Évènements rares : les outsiders sont-ils négligeables ?. 2026. ⟨hal-05521696⟩
Version anglaise de cette référence / english version of the preceding deposit
