  In any case, equilibrium theory as an autonomous discipline is misleading. What we want, after all, is a treatment of equilibrium in the non-equilibrium context. We would like to understand how and why systems evolve from any initially fixed macroscopic state, taking equilibrium to be just the “end point” of such dynamic evolution. So it is to the general account of non-equilibrium we must turn if we want a fuller understanding of how this probabilistic theory is functioning in physics.