In my view all salvation for philosophy may be expected to come from Darwin's theory. - Ludwig Boltzmann

Even as a musician can recognize his Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert after hearing the first few bars, so can a mathematician recognize his Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi, Helmholtz, or Kirchhoff after the first few pages. The French writers reveal themselves by their extreme formal elegance, while the English, especially Maxwell, by their dramatic sense. Who, for example, is not familiar with Maxwell's memoirs on his dynamic theory of gases? ... The variations of the velocities are, at first, developed majestically; then from one side enter the equations of state; and from the other side, the equations of motion in a central field. Ever higher soars the chaos of formulae. Suddenly, we hear, as from kettle drums, the four beats "put n = 5". The evil spirit V (the relative velocity of the two molecules) vanishes; and, even as in music, a hitherto dominating figure in the bass is suddenly silenced, that which had seemed insuperable has been overcome as if by a stroke of magic. This is not the time to ask why this or that substitution. If you are not swept along with the development, lay aside the paper. Maxwell does not write programme music with explanatory notes. ... One result after another follows in quick succession till at last, as the unexpected climax, we arrive at the conditions for thermal equilibrium together with the expressions for the transport coefficients. The curtain then falls!

I pointed out in the second part of my paper... that my Minimum Theorem, as well as the so-called , are only theorems of probability. The Second Law can never be proved mathematically by means of the equations of dynamics alone.

Mr. Culverwell says that my theorem cannot be true because if it were true every atom of the universe would have the same average , and all energy would be dissipated. I find, on the contrary, that this argument only lends to confirm my theorem, which requires only that in the course of time the universe must tend to a state where the average vis viva of every atom is the same and all energy is dissipated, and that is indeed the case.