Related papers: On Boltzmann's genius and thermodynamics
This comprehensive treatise is written for the special occasion of the author's 70th birthday. It presents his lifelong endeavors and reflections with original reasoning and re-interpretations of the most critical and misleading issues in…
The family of Boltzmann distributions is used in statistical mechanics to describe the distribution of states in systems with a given temperature. We give a novel characterization of this family as the unique one satisfying independence for…
J. Willard Gibbs published a book in 1902 on statistical mechanics that quickly received significant attention from his contemporaries because of the reputation that he had secured with his prior work on thermodynamics. People reading…
In 2012, Chen Ning Yang received a 90th birthday gift in the form of a black cube inscribed with his 13 most important contributions, which cover four major areas of physics: statistical mechanics, condensed matter physics, particle physics…
I present some reminiscences, both personal and scientific, over a lifetime of admiration of, and friendship with, one of the Grandmasters of our subject.
In this paper, I aim to clarify the unconscious ideologies and attitudes held by physicists through Prigogine's work. Prigogine was an outstanding chemist and physicist who made significant contributions to the development of…
An experiment proposed by Karl Popper is considered by many to be a crucial test of quantum mechanics. Although many loopholes in the original proposal have been pointed out, they are not crucial to the test. We use only the standard…
Are your perceptions, memories and observational data, a statistical fluctuation out of the thermal equilibrium of the universe, having no correlation with the actual past state of the universe? Arguments are given in the literature for and…
We treat the problem of the approach to thermal equilibrium by only resorting to quantum dynamics of an isolated macroscopic system. Inspired by the two important works in 2009 and in 1929, we have noted that a condition we call…
The fortieth anniversary of the original construction of Supergravity provides an opportunity to combine some reminiscences of its early days with an assessment of its impact on the quest for a quantum theory of gravity.
In honor of Alan Turing's hundredth birthday, I unwisely set out some thoughts about one of Turing's obsessions throughout his life, the question of physics and free will. I focus relatively narrowly on a notion that I call "Knightian…
The thermodynamic approach shows that the total energy produced by humanity disrupts the thermal balance of the planet and causes counteraction, that is, climate change, which can slow down the progress of civilization. This outcome not…
Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics has been criticized as incoherent and opportunistic, and based on doubtful philosophical premises. If so Bohr's influence, in the pre-war period of 1927-1939, is the harder to explain, and the…
For a long time now, confusion has existed in the minds of many over the meaning of various concepts in thermodynamics. Recently, this point has been brought to people's attention by two articles appearing on the well-known archive (arxiv)…
The Boltzmann and Gibbs approaches to statistical mechanics have very different definitions of equilibrium and entropy. The problems associated with this are discussed and it is suggested that they can be resolved, to produce a version of…
We describe a thought experiment using an isolated system of known parameters and assuming the correctness of Clausius and Boltzmann descriptions of entropy. The experiment produced an astronomical increase in the number of possible ways…
Since its inception, quantum theory has been the subject of fierce interpretive controversy, which persists to this day. Disputed topics include the basic ontology and dynamics of the theory, the role (if any) of measurement, the meaning of…
We present a brief history of how the famous Maximum Entropy Principle was used as closure of moments of the Boltzmann equation. In particular, we want to remark on the important role of two fundamental papers by Wolfgang Dreyer, one in the…
This paper is a commentary on Rudolph Peierls's "In defence of measurement" Physics World 19-20, January 1991 to accompany the reprint of this paper for the special volume dedicated to the celebration of the centenary of the discovery of…
The Bohr--Einstein debate is one of the more remarkable protracted intellectual exchanges in the history of physics. Its influence has been lasting: One of the few clear patterns in a 2013 survey about quantum foundations was that the…