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The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy increases (or does not change) by time in an isolated system. As microscopic physical laws are reversible, the origin of irreversibility is not straightforward. Although the outcome of a…
Skeptics of biological evolution often claim that evolution requires a decrease in entropy, giving rise to a conflict with the second law of thermodynamics. This argument is fallacious because it neglects the large increase in entropy…
The heat theorem (i.e. the second law of thermodynamics or the existence of entropy) is a manifestation of a general property of hamiltonian mechanics and of the ergodic Hypothesis. In nonequilibrium thermodynamics of stationary states the…
Power-law distributions are widely observed in complex systems, yet establishing their thermodynamic consistency remains a theoretical challenge. In this paper, we present a thermodynamic framework for power-law statistics based on the…
The Heat theorem reveals the second law of equilibrium Thermodynamics (i.e.existence of Entropy) as a manifestation of a general property of Hamiltonian Mechanics and of the Ergodic Hypothesis, valid for 1 as well as $10^{23}$ degrees of…
For a small driven system coupled strongly to a heat bath, internal energy and exchanged heat are identified such that they obey the usual additive form of the first law. By identifying this exchanged heat with the entropy change of the…
We prove the second law of thermodynamics and the nonequilibirum fluctuation theorem for pure quantum states.The entire system obeys reversible unitary dynamics, where the initial state of the heat bath is not the canonical distribution but…
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,…
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…
The entropy production rate is a key quantity in non-equilibrium thermodynamics of both classical and quantum processes. No universal theory of entropy production is available to date, which hinders progress towards its full grasping. By…
We present a new outlook on the climate system thermodynamics, studying some of its macroscopic properties in terms of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics. We review and clarify the notion of efficiency of the climate system by…
Small systems in contact with a heat bath evolve by stochastic dynamics. Here we show that, when one such small system is weakly coupled to another one, it is possible to infer the presence of such weak coupling by observing the violation…
The property of Tsallis entropy is examined when considering tow systems with different temperatures to be in contact with each other and to reach the thermal equilibrium. It is verified that the total Tsallis entropy of the two systems…
Fluctuation theorems specify the non-zero probability to observe negative entropy production, contrary to a naive expectation from the second law of thermodynamics. For closed particle trajectories in a fluid, Stokes theorem can be used to…
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,…
It is a common belief that in any environment where life is possible, life will be generated. Here it is suggested that the cause for a spontaneous generation of complex systems is probability driven processes. Based on equilibrium…
People are well aware that, inherently, certain small-scale nonchaotic particle movements are not governed by thermodynamics. Usually, such phenomena are studied by kinetic theory and their energy properties are considered "trivial". In…
As remarked by Boltzmann, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is notable for the fact that it is readily proved using elementary statistical arguments, but becomes harder and harder to verify the more precise the microscopic description of a…
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…
Thermodynamics is usually developed starting from entropy and the maximum entropy principle. We investigate here to what extent one can replace entropy with relative entropy which has several advantages, for example in the context of local…