Related papers: Source of the observed thermodynamic arrow
The crucial role of ambient correlations in determining thermodynamic behavior is established. A class of entangled states of two macroscopic systems is constructed such that each component is in a state of thermal equilibrium at a given…
The nature of time has beguiled philosophers for nearly three millennia. There are myriad types of time including cosmological time, biological time, psychological time, physical time, historical time, and even theological time. My brief…
Entropic-force cosmology provides, in contrast with dark energy descriptions, a concrete physical understanding of the accelerated expansion of the universe. The acceleration appears to be a consequence of the entropy associated with the…
The reversibility and recurrence paradoxes are key issues that have been left unsolved in researches on the foundation of thermodynamics since the 19th century. This article shows that (1) the reversibility paradox can be overcome if we pay…
In this paper we discuss the traditional approaches to the problem of the arrow of time. On the basis of this discussion we adopt a global and non-entropic approach, according to which the arrow of time has a global origin and is an…
Time is, figuratively and literally, becoming the new dimension for crystalline matter. As such, rapid recent progress on time-varying media gave rise to the notion of temporal and spatiotemporal crystals. Fundamentally rethinking the role…
Our universe seems to be radiation dominated at early times, and vacuum energy dominated at late times. When we consider the maximal analytic extension of this spacetime, its symmetries and complex analytic properties suggest a picture in…
The recent development of the theory of fluctuation relations has led to new insights into the ever-lasting question of how irreversible behavior emerges from time-reversal symmetric microscopic dynamics. We provide an introduction to…
The second law of thermodynamics states that for a thermally isolated system entropy never decreases. Most physical processes we observe in nature involve variations of macroscopic quantities over spatial and temporal scales much larger…
We demonstrate that the cosmological arrow of time is the cause for the arrow of time associated with the retarded radiation. This implies that the proposed mathematical model serves to confirm the hypothesis of Gold and Wheeler that the…
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…
The epistemic arrow of time is the fact that our knowledge of the past seems to be both of a different kind and more detailed than our knowledge of the future. Just like with the other arrows of time, it has often been speculated that the…
Quantum cosmology offers a unique stage to address questions of time related to its underlying (and perhaps truly quantum dynamical) meaning as well as its origin. Some of these issues can be analyzed with a general scheme of quantum…
We describe the evolution of the early and late universe from thermodynamic considerations, using the generalized non-extensive Tsallis entropy with a variable exponent. A new element in our analysis is the inclusion of a bulk viscosity in…
This paper presents a unified formulation of the origin of the arrow of time in classical and quantum mechanics. We begin with a mechanical analysis of a one-dimensional three-particle system, which provides a concrete example in which…
In a quantum universe with a strong arrow of time, it is standard to postulate that the initial wave function started in a particular macrostate--the special low-entropy macrostate selected by the Past Hypothesis. Moreover, there is an…
Motivated by the mounting evidence for dark energy, here we explore the consequences of a fundamental cosmological constant $\Lambda$ for our universe. We show that when the gravitational entropy of a pure DeSitter state ultimately wins…
A clear explanation is given on how the causal, psychological, and electrodynamic time arrows emerge from the thermodynamic time arrow.
Consider a Hamiltonian system that consists of a slow subsystem S and a fast subsystem F. The autonomous dynamics of S is driven by an effective Hamiltonian, but its thermodynamics is unexpected. We show that a well-defined thermodynamic…
We employ the law of increasing entropy and the assumption about the decrease of the ground state energy to answer the question what are the reasons of the Big Bang and the origin of the Universe.