Imagine a freely rotating rigid body. The body has three principal axes of
rotation. It follows from mathematical analysis of the evolution equations that
pure rotations around the major and minor axes are stable while rotation around
the middle axis is unstable. However, only rotation around the major axis (with
highest moment of inertia) is stable in physical reality (as demonstrated by
the unexpected change of rotation of the Explorer 1 probe). We propose a
general method of Ehrenfest regularization of Hamiltonian equations by which
the reversible Hamiltonian equations are equipped with irreversible terms
constructed from the Hamiltonian dynamics itself. The method is demonstrated on
harmonic oscillator, rigid body motion (solving the problem of stable minor
axis rotation), ideal fluid mechanics and kinetic theory. In particular, the
regularization can be seen as a birth of irreversibility and dissipation. In
addition, we discuss and propose discretizations of the Ehrenfest regularized
evolution equations such that key model characteristics (behavior of energy and
entropy) are valid in the numerical scheme as well