Dynamics from iterated averaging

Abstract

We prove that for a standard Lebesgue space $X$, the strong operator closure of the semigroup generated by conditional expectations on $L^\infty(X)$ contains the group of measure-preserving automorphisms. This is based on a solution to the following puzzle: given $n$ full water tanks, each containing one unit of water, and $n$ empty ones, how much water can be transferred from the full tanks to the empty ones by repeatedly equilibrating the water levels between pairs of tanks?