Paper applies statistical mechanics to 16 literary works, finding word frequencies follow Rayleigh-Jeans thermalization
burny_tech · x · 2026-11-12
An arXiv paper, Thermodynamics of words, proposes a "word thermalization hypothesis": effective interactions between words in literary works drive their frequency distribution toward Rayleigh-Jeans (RJ) thermalization and condensation, as seen in physical systems.
Words act as classical oscillators with frequencies analogous to filling factors over energy levels, under conservation of total words and vocabulary size. Analyzing 16 works including the Bible, Shakespeare's complete works, and American National Corpus data:
- Effective system energy is very low, producing strong RJ condensation — much of the probability mass sits in the lowest-energy states, corresponding to rare words appearing only once or twice
- Similar condensation is observed in multimode optical fiber light propagation
- The authors connect word thermalization to wealth thermalization across countries and show Lorenz, Pareto, and Zipf curve analyses fit the theory strikingly well
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