Related papers: Evolution and the second law of thermodynamics
Darwinian Theory depicts life as being overwhelmingly consumed by a fight for survival in a hostile environment. However, from a thermodynamic perspective, life is a dynamic, out of equilibrium process, stabilizing and coevolving in concert…
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy production in macroscopic systems is non-negative, reaching zero only at thermodynamic equilibrium. As a corollary, this implies that the state trajectory of macroscopic systems is…
In this work we focus on the thermodynamics consistency of a new set of solutions emerging from a cosmology in which dark matter is able to decay into relativistic particles within the dark sector. It is important to stress that the…
We study the statistical underpinnings of life. We question some common assumptions about the thermodynamics of life and illustrate how, contrary to widespread belief, even in a closed system entropy growth can accompany an increase in…
A classical and quantum mechanical generalized second law of thermodynamics in cosmology implies constraints on the effective equation of state of the universe in the form of energy conditions, obeyed by many known cosmological solutions,…
We proved when random-variable fluctuations obey the central limit theorem the equality of the uncertainty relation corresponds to the thermodynamic equilibrium state. The inequality corresponds to the thermodynamic non-equilibrium state.…
The most important thermodynamic work performed by life today is the dissipation of the solar photon flux into heat through organic pigments in water. From this thermodynamic perspective, biological evolution is thus just the dispersal of…
In classical Hamiltonian theories, entropy may be understood either as a statistical property of canonical systems, or as a mechanical property, that is, as a monotonic function of the phase space along trajectories. In classical mechanics,…
We argue that the entanglement entropy for a very small subsystem obeys a property which is analogous to the first law of thermodynamics when we excite the system. In relativistic setups, its effective temperature is proportional to the…
We investigate the validity of the generalized second law of thermodynamics, in the cosmological scenario where dark energy interacts with both dark matter and radiation. Calculating separately the entropy variation for each fluid component…
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…
Several comments are given to previous proofs of the generalised second law of thermodynamics: black hole entropy plus ordinary matter entropy never decreases for a thermally closed system. Arguments in favour of its truism are given in the…
Unlike most other laws of nature, the second law of thermodynamics is of a statistical nature, according to Boltzmann, meaning that its reliability arises from the vast number of particles present in macroscopic systems. This means that…
Validity of local equilibrium has been questioned for non-equilibrium systems which are characterized by delayed response. In particular, for systems with non-zero thermodynamic inertia, the assumption of local equilibrium leads to negative…
According to the entropy bound, the entropy of a complete physical system can be universally bounded in terms of its circumscribing radius and total gravitating energy. Page's three recent candidates for counterexamples to the bound are…
Previously derived "global" thermodynamic speed limit theorems state that increasing the maximum speed with which a system can evolve between two given probability distributions over its states requires the system to produce more entropy in…
The experimental verification of the fluctuation theorem by Wang et al. is explained in terms of a simple Langevin dynamics. This implies that the entropy consuming trajectories found by Wang et al. are fluctuations generated by a random…
The standard argument for the Lorentz invariance of the thermodynamic entropy in equilibrium is based on the assumption that it is possible to perform an adiabatic transformation whose only outcome is to accelerate a macroscopic body,…
This article presents a heuristic combination of the local and global formulations of the second law of thermodynamics that suggests the possibility of theoretical existence of thermodynamics processes with positive and negative entropy…
In this paper, we investigate an important issue addressed by several approaches to quantum cosmology, like that based on loop quantum gravity and string theory: the existence of an arrow of time driving the cosmological evolution according…