Does random have rules?

[watchamadoodle]

The concept of entropy was invented in the context of classical mechanics, which was perfectly deterministic.

I think one of the important aspects is the ergodic hypothesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_hypothesis

which allows you to look at the system averaged over time as if you had many different copies of the same system with randomized initial conditions. I have the suspicion that this might open up the possibility to talk about probabilities and such in a deterministic system. But I haven't thought about it in detail, and this is just what I came up spontaneously. If I meet a statistical physics person in the coffee room later I shall ask.

It seems to me that if you tried to derive the thermodynamic laws bottom-up from a deterministic model of particle behavior, then your laws would not be laws. The thermodynamic laws would need to say "this is almost always true for a large population of particles." instead of "this is always true".

I have read that many physicists think entropy and thermodynamics are the most trustworthy ideas in physics, so I think that means randomness must be a real thing.

I think it would be really neat if randomness is a real thing, because so many ancient cultures believed that the world was created in a battle between a god of law and a god of chaos.