Journal of Statistical Physics, Vol. 48, Nos. 5/6, 1987. p. 1295-1320.
It is widely recognized that for highly unstable dynamical systems there exists a fundamental limitation on predictability and determinism. An important class of such highly unstable systems is the class of K-flow, which is further characterized by the existence of time-asymmetric objects in the form of K-partition. Our recent approach to the problem of irreversibility has shown that when the implications of the limitation on determinism arising from strong form of instability and those of the existence of K-partition are consistently taken into account, one is naturally led from the physically unrealizable deterministic evolution of phase points to an entropy-increasing stochastic Markovian evolution. Furthermore, this transition is not the result of extraneously imposed coarse graining and/or approximation schemes, but can be brought about by an invertible transformation whose existence and construction are determined by the nature of the instability of the dynamical system itself. After a brief review of this theory which also contains some relatively new remarks, we prove that classical Klein-Gordon field (both massive and massless) possess the structure of K-flow. This seems to provide the first examples of relativistic systems that are K-flows. Some of the implications of this result are briefly discussed. From a mathematical point of view, this seems to be a first step toward an ergodic theory of partial differential equations. In the process, we also provide an independant group-theoretic proof of the existence of incoming and outgoing subspaces of the scattering theory of Lax and Phillips for the wave equation.