The Statistical Mechanics Of Boltzmann Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Gribbin (1989: 368):

It was Boltzmann who showed that entropy (a concept introduced by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius in 1865) is a measure of the disorder of a system.  Boltzmann's approach was statistical.  The behaviour of a gas could be explained, he found, by the random motions of very many molecules colliding with each other and with the walls of any container in which the gas was confined.  The rules that describe such a system of many particles interacting at random are very accurate and reliable — they start out from simple probability calculations (like the chance of rolling two sixes on a pair of dice three times in a row) and give you the odds of certain possibilities occurring for the system of molecules that make up the gas, and they tell you what the most probable state for such a system is.  The set of equations developed by Boltzmann and later refined by others is called statistical mechanics.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, Boltzmann's probability calculations quantify physical systems as potential, and the statistical behaviours of interacting particles are quantified instances of that potential.