Related papers: The Second Law as a Cause of the Evolution
After presenting possible motives for fighting against the second law of thermodynamics, several attempts to beat this law are analyzed. The second law wins, but an interesting interpretation of it emerges. This interpretation uses the…
Why can the world resist the law of entropy increase and produce self-organizing structure? Does the entropy of an isolated system always only increase and never decrease? Can be thermodymamic degradation and self-organizing evolution…
The second law of thermodynamics, formulated as an ultimate bound on the maximum extractable work, has been rigorously derived in multiple scenarios. However, the unavoidable limitations that emerge due to the lack of control on small…
Free energy and entropy are examined in detail from the standpoint of classical thermodynamics. The approach is logically based on the fact that thermodynamic work is mediated by thermal energy through the tendency for nonthermal energy to…
The validity of the Second Law of thermodynamics, indisputable in the macroscopic world, is challenged at the mesoscopic level: a mesoscopic isolated system, possessing spatial dimensions of the order of a few microns, is capable, as shown…
We derive a formulation of the First Law of nonequilibrium thermodynamics for biological information-processing systems by partitioning entropy in the Second Law into microscopic and mesoscopic components and by assuming that natural…
In a previous work (M. Campisi. Stud. Hist. Phil. M. P. 36 (2005) 275-290) we have addressed the mechanical foundations of equilibrium thermodynamics on the basis of the Generalized Helmholtz Theorem. It was found that the volume entropy…
We give meaning to the first and second laws of thermodynamics in case of mesoscopic out-of-equilibrium systems which are driven by diffusion processes. The notion of the entropy production is analyzed. The role of the Helmholtz extremum…
I argue here that both the first and second laws of thermodynamics, generally understood to be quintessentially physical in nature, can be equally well described as being about certain types of information without the need to invoke…
In statistical mechanics the zeroth law of thermodynamics is taken as a postulate which, as its name indicates, logically precedes the first and second laws. Treating it as a postulate has consequences for how temperature is introduced into…
The Gibbs distribution universally characterizes states of thermal equilibrium. In order to extend the Gibbs distribution to non-equilibrium steady states, one must relate the self-information $\mathcal{I}(x) = -\log(P_\text{ss}(x))$ of…
For a small driven system coupled strongly to a heat bath, internal energy and exchanged heat are identified such that they obey the usual additive form of the first law. By identifying this exchanged heat with the entropy change of the…
The Kelvin-Planck statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a stricture on the nature of heat receipt by any body suffering a cyclic process. It makes no mention of temperature or of entropy. Beginning with a Kelvin-Planck statement…
Events in mesoscopic systems often take place at first-passage times, as is for instance the case for a colloidal particle that escapes a metastable state. An interesting question is how much work an external agent has done on a particle…
The heat theorem (i.e. the second law of thermodynamics or the existence of entropy) is a manifestation of a general property of hamiltonian mechanics and of the ergodic Hypothesis. In nonequilibrium thermodynamics of stationary states the…
Here we deconstruct, and then in a reasoned way reconstruct, the concept of "entropy of a system," paying particular attention to where the randomness may be coming from. We start with the core concept of entropy as a COUNT associated with…
According to the second law of thermodynamics, the arrow of time points to an ever increasing entropy of the Universe. However, exactly how the entropy evolves with time and what drives the growth remain largely unknown. Here, for the first…
When thermodynamics is understood as the science (or art) of constructing effective models of natural phenomena by choosing a minimal level of description capable of capturing the essential features of the physical reality of interest, the…
The microscopic derivation of the second law for macroscopic system is given under the phenomenological assumption that both the initial and final states are described by mutually different canonical ensembles. In particular, it is also…
The chemical composition of the earths atmosphere far from equilibrium is unique in the solar system and has been attributed to the presence of widespread life. Here I show that this perspective can be quantified using non-equilibrium…