The Kac ring or the art of making idealisations (Q828337)

This work is built on a chapter of the PhD thesis of the author and explores the role of idealizations in a model introduced by \textit{M. Kac} [Probability and related topics in the physical sciences, New York: Interscience Publications (1959)], the so-called Kac ring, which is argued to be an active one rather than a limitation. The situation in which a toy model contains idealisations that represent general features remaining true for different empirical target systems is suggested to be true in general. The paper first discusses the historical context in which the model came into life, as well as the model itself, motivating why it might serve the purpose of enabling us to grap how to reconcile the observable irreversible behavior with time reversibility and recurrence. The author further discusses the role of models and their interpretation in philosophy of science. She motivates how the idealisations in the Kac ring model are designed to make consequences of the Boltzmann's assumptions easy to draw. She stresses in particular how each idealisation plays an active role in the model representing by analogy a general property of macroscopic phenomena as hypothesised in the H-theorem of Boltzmann.