ication of a molecule's structure and how it interacts with other molecules. Yet statistical mechanics can deduce empirically valid macro-phenomena. Khinchin (1949), who pioneered the development of mathematical foundations for the field, writes: Those general laws of mechanics which are used in statisti

ymbolic dynamics in sequence space. It was Kolmogoroff (1958) who first applied Shannon’s ideas of entropy and information (Shannon and Weaver, 1949; Khinchin, 1957) to the quantification of these dynamical system’s telegraphic messages as discrete, “stochastic” (random, probabilistic) output. Kolmogoroff