Related papers: A model for discussing entropy and time reversibil…
These lectures deal with the problem of inductive inference, that is, the problem of reasoning under conditions of incomplete information. Is there a general method for handling uncertainty? Or, at least, are there rules that could in…
The relationship between the intrinsic motion of gravity, light, and time is explored in terms of the principles of entropy, causality, energy, and symmetry conservation. A conceptual mechanism for gravity and the gravitational connection…
The behavior of lattice models in which time reversibility is enforced at the level of trajectories (microscopic reversibility) is studied analytically. Conditions for ergodicity breaking are explored, and a few examples of systems…
One observes that a considerable level of confusion remains about some of those aspects of irreversibility, entropy generation and `the arrow of time' which actually are well understood. This demands that great care must be taken in any…
Master equation could be applied to model various kinds of biochemical systems. A general theory for its time-dependent nonequilibrium thermodynamics is rigorously derived. We not only introduce a concept of general internal energy, but…
Irreversibility is a fundamental concept with important implications at many levels. It pinpoints the fundamental difference between the intrinsically reversible microscopic equations of motion and the unidirectional arrow of time that…
We focus attention on some particular thermodynamic relations (PTR). Using information theory concepts we show that, for a reversible process, microscopic considerations related to these PTR make the concomitant informational contents of…
In this paper, we analyze the relationship between entropy and information in the context of the mixing process of two identical ideal gases. We will argue that entropy has a special information-based feature that is enfolded in the…
In the scientific and engineering literature, the second law of thermodynamics is expressed in terms of the behavior of entropy in reversible and irreversible processes. According to the prevailing statistical mechanics interpretation the…
Irreversibility is one of the most intriguing concepts in physics. While microscopic physical laws are perfectly reversible, macroscopic average behavior has a preferred direction of time. According to the second law of thermodynamics, this…
This thesis investigates the connection between quantum theory, thermodynamics and information theory. Theories with structure similar to that of quantum theory are considered, mathematically described by the framework of "Generalized…
Student learning in upper division thermal physics has not been studied to the same extent as in other courses like electromagnetism and quantum mechanics. Studies addressing reasoning and learning at the graduate level are even more…
Partial differential equations are ubiquitous in almost all applications of mathematics, where they provide a natural mathematical description of many phenomena involving change in physical, chemical, biological, and social processes. The…
In an Introductory Physics for Life Science (IPLS) course that leverages authentic biological examples, student ideas about entropy as "disorder" or "chaos" come into contact with their ideas about the spontaneous formation of organized…
We prove a lower bound on the relative entropy between two finite-dimensional states in terms of their entropy difference and the dimension of the underlying space. The inequality is tight in the sense that equality can be attained for any…
Thermodynamics could be seen as an expression of physics at a high epistemic level. As such, its potential as an inductive bias to help machine learning procedures attain accurate and credible predictions has been recently realized in many…
Moore and Schroeder proposed an effective approach to introducing entropy and the second law through computational study of models with easily countable states at fixed energy. But such systems are rare: the only familiar examples are the…
I argue that if a special science satisfies certain key assumptions that are familiar from physicalist accounts of the special sciences and from physics, then its causal regularities have an associated notion of entropy, and that this…
Microscopic physical laws are time-symmetric, hence, a priori there exists no preferential temporal direction. However, the second law of thermodynamics allows one to associate the "forward" temporal direction to a positive variation of the…
Within the general formalism of quantum theory irreversibility and the arrow of time in the evolution of various physical systems are studied. Irreversible behavior often manifests itself in the guise of entropy production. This motivates…