Abstract

This article highlights the limitations of typicality accounts of thermodynamic behavior so as to promote an alternative line of research: understanding and accounting for the success of the techniques and equations physicists use to model the behavior of systems that begin away from equilibrium. This article also takes steps in this promising direction. It examines a technique commonly used to model the behavior of an important kind of system: a Brownian particle that has been introduced to an isolated fluid at equilibrium. It also accounts for the success of the model, by identifying and grounding the technique’s key assumptions.