Related papers: The Second Law and Cosmology

It exists a large class of systems for which the traditional notion of extensivity breaks down. From experimental examples we induce two general hypothesis concerning such systems. In the first the existence of an internal coordinate system…

The notion of inflation (past or present) in standard cosmological models is shown to be a consequence of a sufficiently high second law entropy production from the internal heating of the universal expansion. The longitudinal viscous…

We investigate the laws of thermodynamics in an accelerating universe driven by dark energy with a time-dependent equation of state. In the case we consider that the physically relevant part of the Universe is that envelopped by the…

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…

Does inflation provide a compelling explanation for why the universe is so large, so flat, and so old, and a predictive theory of density perturbations? In this brief contribution (based on the role of the author as moderator of the…

We propose that in time dependent backgrounds the holographic principle should be replaced by the generalized second law of thermodynamics. For isotropic open and flat universes with a fixed equation of state, the generalized second law…

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 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…

We show that the conservation and the non-additivity of the information, together with the additivity of the entropy make the entropy increase in an isolated system. The collapse of the entangled quantum state offers an example of the…

An interesting question to explore in physics classes is whether gravity violates the second law of thermodynamics. Standard physics textbooks provide little to no discussion of the relationship between entropy and gravity, and the same is…

The essential postulates of classical thermodynamics are formulated, from which the second law is deduced as the principle of increase of entropy in irreversible adiabatic processes that take one equilibrium state to another. The entropy…

We pointed out that the generalized second law of thermodynamics on a de Sitter universe whose energy density stochastically fluctuates due to quantum fluctuations is seemingly violated. We have shown that even in such a case, the…

In a macroscopic (quantum or classical) Hamiltonian system, we prove the second law of thermodynamics in the forms of the minimum work principle and the law of entropy increase, under the assumption that the initial state is described by a…

The microscopic explanation of entropy has been challenged from both experimental and theoretical point of view. The expression of entropy is derived from the first law of thermodynamics indicating that entropy or the second law of…

This article is a short version of a longer article to appear in Physics Reports (cond-mat/9708200). The essential postulates of classical thermodynamics are formulated, from which the second law is deduced as the principle of increase of…

We examine the second law of thermodynamics in the context of horizon cosmology, in particular, whether the change of total entropy (i.e. the sum of the entropy for the apparent horizon and the entropy for the matter fields) proves to be…

It has previously been shown that it is more general to describe the evolution of the universe based on the emergence of the space and the energy balance relation. Here we investigate the thermodynamic properties of the universe described…

We discuss the evolution of the universe in the context of the second law of thermodynamics from its early stages to the far future. Cosmological observations suggest that most matter and radiation will be absorbed by the cosmological…

We conjecture a novel Generalized Second Law that can be applied in cosmology, regardless of whether an event horizon is present: the generalized entropy increases monotonically outside of certain hypersurfaces we call past Q-screens. A…

In the standard model of cosmology, the Universe began its expansion with an anomalously low entropy, which then grew dramatically to much larger values consistent with the physical conditions at decoupling, roughly 380,000 years after the…