* 1945–1946 – Nikolay Bogoliubov develops a general method for a microscopic derivation of kinetic equations for classical statistical systems using BBGKY hierarchy
* 1947 – Nikolay Bogoliubov and Kirill Gurov extend this method for a microscopic derivation of kinetic equations for quantum statistical systems
* 1948 – Claude Elwood Shannon establishes information theory
* 1957 – Aleksandr Solomonovich Kompaneets derives his Compton scattering Fokker–Planck equation
* 1957 – Ryogo Kubo derives the first of the Green-Kubo relations for linear transport coefficients 
* 1957 – Edwin T. Jaynes publishes two papers detailing the MaxEnt interpretation of thermodynamics from information theory 
* 1960–1965 – Dmitry Zubarev develops the method of non-equilibrium statistical operator, which becomes a classical tool in the statistical theory of non-equilibrium processes
* 1972 – Jacob Bekenstein suggests that black holes have an entropy proportional to their surface area
* 1974 – Stephen Hawking predicts that black holes will radiate particles with a black-body spectrum which can cause black hole evaporation
*1977 – Ilya Prigogine wins the Nobel prize for his work on dissipative structures in thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium.  The importation and dissipation of energy could reverse the 2nd law of thermodynamics