Ergodic hypothesis

Common card · No. 446200

In physics and thermodynamics, the ergodic hypothesis says that, over long periods of time, the time spent by a system in some region of the phase space of microstates with the same energy is proportional to the volume of this region; i.e., that over long periods of time all accessible microstates are equiprobable. Liouville's theorem states that, for a Hamiltonian system, the local density of microstates following a particle path through phase space is constant as viewed by an observer moving with the ensemble—i.e., the convective time derivative is zero. Thus, if the microstates are uniformly distributed in phase space initially, they shall remain so at all times. But Liouville's theorem does not imply that the ergodic hypothesis holds for all Hamiltonian systems. The ergodic hypothesis is often assumed in the statistical analysis of computational physics. The analyst would assume that the average of a process parameter over time and the average over the statistical ensemble are the same...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Guy vandegrift, CC BY-SA 3.0