Related papers: Reflections on Gibbs: From Statistical Physics to …
Kenneth G. Wilson made deep and insightful contributions to statistical physics, particle physics, and related fields. He was also a helpful and thoughtful human being.
During his time at Royal Institute of Technology (Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan, KTH) in Sweden, the present author learned nonequilibrium thermodynamics from Mats Hillert. The key concepts are the separation of internal and external…
This paper gives a short review of the history of statistical physics starting from D. Bernoulli's kinetic theory of gases in the 18th century until the recent new developments in nonequilibrium kinetic theory in the last decades of this…
Keldysh field theory, based on adiabatic assumptions, serves as an widely used framework for addressing nonequilibrium many-body systems. Nonetheless, the validity of such adiabatic assumptions when addressing interacting Gibbs states…
Steven Weinberg was a giant of late 20th Century physics on whose shoulders we stand while groping for the science of the 21st Century. This article provides a too-brief summary of a selection of his many achievements -- eight decades of…
Perhaps the most significant, if not the most important, achievements in chemistry and physics are the Periodic Table of the Elements in Chemistry and the Standard Model of Elementary Particles in Physics. A comparable achievement in…
The purpose of this work is to expand and clarify the concept of the class of Gibbs random fields and give its structure the form accepted in the theory of random processes. It is possible thanks to the proposed purely probabilistic…
Some 80-90 years ago, George A. Linhart, unlike A. Einstein, P. Debye, M. Planck and W. Nernst, has managed to derive a very simple, but ultimately general mathematical formula for heat capacity vs. temperature from the fundamental…
Equilibrium statistical mechanics is intended to link the microscopic dynamics of particles to the thermodynamic laws for macroscopic quantities. However, the modern statistical theory is faced with significant difficulties, as applied to…
This is an introduction to geometric algebra, an alternative to traditional vector algebra that expands on it in two ways: 1. In addition to scalars and vectors, it defines new objects representing subspaces of any dimension. 2. It defines…
Shape dynamics is a theory first proposed by Julian Barbour which states that physics happen uniquely in the reduced configuration space of a theory. So far, studies in the area have focused on gravitational systems. Here we first…
These lecture notes introduce some topics of classical statistical physics, particularly those that are relevant for neural networks and deep learning. Statistical physics is treated as a branch of probability theory or statistics, with the…
In a recent paper [1], Sasa, Hiura, Nakagawa, and Yoshida showed that a natural extension of the minimum work principle to small systems uniquely determines the factor $N!$ that arrises in relations connecting statistical mechanical…
Historically, there have been many attempts to produce an appropriate mathematical formalism for modeling the nature of physical space, such as Euclid's geometry, Descartes' system of Cartesian coordinates, the Argand plane, Hamilton's…
Our understanding of the four basic concepts of Physics -- space, time, matter and force -- has undergone radical change in the course of work on unification, starting with Maxwell's unification of electricity with magnetism, all the way to…
A paper of Thomas Young (1773-1829) on the behavior of streams of air makes a good starting point for discussing the not always fair, sometimes serendipitous, association of a physical phenomenon with its discoverer. In a didactic context,…
Gibbs sampling is fundamental to a wide range of computer algorithms. Such algorithms are set to be replaced by physics based processors$-$be it quantum or stochastic annealing devices$-$which embed problem instances and evolve a physical…
The theory of Physical Structures (TPS) was put forward by Professor Yu.I. Kulakov for the sake of classifying the laws of Physics. The history of the development of that theory is given in his monograph [1]. A physical structure is a…
Gibbs states play a central role in quantum statistical mechanics as the standard description of thermal equilibrium. Traditionally, their use is justified either by a heuristic, a posteriori reasoning, or by derivations based on notions of…
Consistent statistical physical description is given for systems where the elementary excitations are composite objects. Explicit calculational scheme is constructed for the energy density and the total number of thermodynamical degrees of…