Related papers: The Second Law as a Cause of the Evolution
Almost all processes -- highly correlated, weakly correlated, or correlated not at all---exhibit statistical fluctuations. Often physical laws, such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, address only typical realizations -- as highlighted by…
There are several formulations of the second law, and they may, in principle, have different domains of validity. Here a simple mathematical theorem is proven which serves as the most general basis for the second law, namely the Thomson…
Originally formulated for macroscopic machines, the laws of thermodynamics were recently shown to hold for quantum systems coupled to ideal sources of work (external classical fields) and heat (systems at equilibrium). Ongoing efforts have…
Even though the second law of thermodynamics holds the supreme position among the laws of nature, as stated by many distinguished scientists, notably Eddington and Einstein, its position appears to be also quite peculiar. Given the atomic…
The second law of thermodynamics constitutes a fundamental principle of physics, precluding the existence of perpetual motion machines and providing a natural definition of the arrow of time. Its scope extends across virtually all areas of…
A definition of the thermodynamic entropy based on the time-dependent probability distribution of the macroscopic variables is developed. When a constraint in a composite system is released, the probability distribution for the new…
Second law of thermodynamics can be apparently violated for systems whose dynamics depends on acquired information by measurement. However, when one consider measurement and erasure process together along with the system it saves the second…
The second law of thermodynamics is discussed and reformulated from a quantum information theoretic perspective for open quantum systems using relative entropy. Specifically, the relative entropy of a quantum state with respect to…
An extensive survey is given of the historical origins of the Second Law of thermodynamics, illustrated by excerpts from many original sources, and with biographical information about key contributors. The major strands of conceptual…
We study nonequilibrium thermodynamics of complex information flows induced by interactions between multiple fluctuating systems. Characterizing nonequilibrium dynamics by causal networks (i.e., Bayesian networks), we obtain novel…
Understanding the thermodynamic function of life may shed light on its origin. Life, as are all irreversible processes, is contingent on entropy production. Entropy production is a measure of the rate of the tendency of Nature to explore…
The present work shows that the second law of thermodynamics gets naturally satisfied during the entire cosmic evolution of the universe starting from inflation to the late dark energy era, without imposing any exotic condition. This makes…
The Heat theorem reveals the second law of equilibrium Thermodynamics (i.e.existence of Entropy) as a manifestation of a general property of Hamiltonian Mechanics and of the Ergodic Hypothesis, valid for 1 as well as $10^{23}$ degrees of…
In an abstract setting of a general classical mechanical system as a model for the universe we set up a general formalism for a law behind the second law of thermodynamics, i.e. really for "initial conditions". We propose a unification with…
It has long been known that, fundamentally different from a large body of rarefied gas, when a Knudsen gas is immersed in a thermal bath, it may never reach thermal equilibrium. The root cause is nonchaoticity: as the particle-particle…
To address the observation of Max Born (M. Born 1969) that the Newton's second law can emerge from a purely statistical perspective, we derive the evolution equation about the statistical distribution for dilute gas based solely on…
The possibility of stating the second law of thermodynamics in terms of the increasing behaviour of a physical property establishes a connection between that branch of physics and the theory of algebraic inequalities. We use this connection…
A microscopic definition of the thermodynamic entropy in an isolated quantum system must satisfy (i) additivity, (ii) extensivity and (iii) the second law of thermodynamics. We show that the diagonal entropy, which is the Shannon entropy in…
Temperature is an outsider in the laws of motion given by Newton and Einstein and this oversight is the source of the predictions of time-reversal-invariance made by these two great systems of motion. By taking into consideration Planck's…
In the present work we show that the second law of thermodynamics does not generally hold if the matter and gravitational fields are nonminimally coupled. We demonstrate this result by explicitly computing the evolution of the entropy of…