YouTube darling Jon Bois has a series called Pre y Good.

This is about sports stories that are pre y

good. One of the episodes is all about poker and whether it is about skill or luck. He seems to think it is
about luck. Near the end he says that if you went back in me, and stuck a thermometer in the
primordial soup of the universe you would be able to find out what the next card in the deck was going
to be. Why did he pick a thermometer? What is it about thermodynamics that seems to be able to
predict the future? Thermodynamics, it turns out, affects all of physics. If you want to understand what
affects the way the cards interact with each other, and the electrical impulses in the mind of the dealer
that affect the mo on of his hands as he shuffles the cards, it all goes back to the random jiggling of
atoms and sub-atomic par cles billions of years ago.

There are three laws of thermodynamics. The first states that energy is neither created, nor destroyed.
Merely changed from one form to another. Since this law was formulated, it was discovered that mass is
simply another form of energy. Even s ll, the law holds. The second law states that entropy is always
increases. While, energy remains constant, in general it tends to dissipate as heat. All processes
generate some heat that cannot be recovered. The third law states that as the temperature approaches
absolute zero, the number of possible states of the system approaches zero. In layman’s terms, as things
get colder, they allow down.

Saying there are three laws is kind of a lie. While the third law is the final law, there is a zeroth law. The
zeroth law states that if two things are the same temperature, they are the same temperature. That may
seem like an odd thing to say, but it is very important. If I put a thermometer into one puddle of goo and
then put it into another puddle of goo and get the same reading, both puddles of goo have a property of
temperature which is equivalent. This ma ers because there is no intui ve “scale” for temperature. I
can put two things next to each other and see they are the same height, I can put them on a scale and
see that they balance and have the same mass. There is nothing I can do with temperature except put a
thermometer in one and a thermometer in the other and just trust that it is measuring something that is
the same in both.

I men on those because I want to add a fi h law. While, Jo Bois was very insigh ul in saying that the
state of our current universe is based on random jiggling that happened in the past, what he neglects is
that that random jiggling is s ll going on. Randomness in the universe is s ll being generated and will
con nue to be generated making it impossible to predict the future state of the universe even if I knew
absolutely everything about the current state of the universe. That is the minus oneth law of
thermodynamics, “you can’t predict the future.”

That video has been taken down now. I guess it was for copyright reasons, it had a lot of clips from a lot
of poker tournaments. I am here wri ng a book about a video that no longer exists. Who could have
predicted that?