Related papers: Emergence of statistical behavior in many particle…
Time-reversal had always been assumed to be a symmetry of physics at the fundamental level. In this paper we will explore the violations of time-reversal symmetry at the fundamental level and the consequences on thermodynamic systems.…
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Ludwig Boltzmann explained how irreversible macroscopic laws, in particular the second law of thermodynamics, originate in the time-reversible laws of microscopic physics. Boltzmann's analysis,…
In the second half of the 19th century, the kinetic theory of gases has probably raised one of the most impassioned debates in the history of science. The so-called reversibility paradox around which intense polemics occurred reveals the…
Emergence of one-time-direction macroscopic evolution of a classical system of two mixed gases having different temperatures is derived and explained. The analysis performed at the microscopic level, where the time-symmetric laws of…
The issue of how time reversible microscopic dynamics gives rise to macroscopic irreversible processes has been a recurrent issue in Physics since the time of Boltzmann whose ideas shaped, and essentially resolved, such an apparent…
Well before the atomistic nature of matter was experimentally established, Ludwig Boltzmann's audacious effort to explain the macroscopic world of human experience in terms of the workings of an unseen microscopic world met with vigorous…
The time irreversibility problem is the dichotomy of the reversible microscopic dynamics and the irreversible macroscopic physics. This problem was considered by Boltzmann, Poincar\'e, Bogolyubov and many other authors and though some…
In this report we discuss the organization of different levels of nature and the corresponding space-time structures by the consideration of a particular problem of time irreversibility. The fundamental time irreversibility problem consists…
It is a remarkable fact that all processes occurring in the observable Universe are irreversible, whereas the equations through which the fundamental laws of physics are formulated are invariant under time reversal. The emergence of…
In textbooks on statistical mechanics, one finds often arguments based on classical mechanics, phase space and ergodicity in order to justify the second law of thermodynamics. However, the basic equations of motion of classical mechanics…
All of the basic microsopic physical laws are time reversible. In contrast, the second law of thermodynamics, which is a macroscopic physical representation of the world, is able to describe irreversible processes in an isolated system…
Ludwig Boltzmann had a hunch that irreversibility exhibited by a macroscopic system arises from the reversible dynamics of its microscopic constituents. He derived a nonlinear integro-differential equation - now called the Boltzmann…
The kinetic theory of Maxwell and Boltzmann has been the subject of major scientific controversies. The alleged incompatibility between the reversible nature of the equations of classical mechanics and the increase of entropy, which, in the…
This article aims at revisiting, with the aid of simple and neat numerical examples, some of the basic features of macroscopic irreversibility, and, thus, of the mechanical foundation of the second principle of thermodynamics as drawn by…
The issue of the thermodynamics of a system of distinguishable particles is discussed in this paper. In constructing the statistical mechanics of distinguishable particles from the definition of Boltzmann entropy, it is found that the…
Thermodynamics allows the application of Statistical Mechanics to finite and even small systems. As surface effects cannot be scaled away, one has to be careful with the standard arguments of splitting a system into two or bringing two…
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…
We consider the kinetic theory of dilute gases in the Boltzmann--Grad limit. We propose a new perspective based on a large deviation estimate for the probability of the empirical distribution dynamics. Assuming Boltzmann molecular chaos…
We demonstrate that irreversibility arises from the principle of microscopic reversibility and the presence of memory in the time evolution of a single copy of a system driven by a protocol. We introduce microscopic reversibility by using…
The literature on dynamical systems has, for the most part, considered self-oscillators (i.e., systems capable of generating and maintaining a periodic motion at the expense of an external energy source with no corresponding periodicity)…