Ergodicity

Ergodicity is a concept from statistical mechanics and dynamical systems theory that describes the behavior of systems over time. In general terms, a system is considered ergodic if its time averages are equivalent to its ensemble averages. This means that a sufficiently long observation of a single trajectory (or the time evolution of a single state of the system) will provide the same statistical properties as observing a large number of different states of the system at a single point in time (the ensemble).