Abstract
For over a century now, we've known that our world is made up of elementary building blocks, such as atoms and molecules, governed by strange laws that respect a perfect symmetry between past and future. How then can we explain the arrow of time and the irreversibility of all phenomena observable on our scale ? This is one of the questions addressed by statistical physics. Bernard Derrida presents a number of recent advances, taking a fresh look at the second principle of thermodynamics, the theory of phase transitions and disordered systems, and recalling some applications to other fields of science.
