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Sliding friction is usually introduced in high school, but rarely through activities in laboratory. A qualitative introduction to friction is presented by proposing exploration of different kind of materials in order to suggest which…
The rate of entropy production by a stochastic process quantifies how far it is from thermodynamic equilibrium. Equivalently, entropy production captures the degree to which detailed balance and time-reversal symmetry are broken. Despite…
Trying to identify the entropy production within a cell has been part of debates and studies in the last century. First the idea was to make a resemblance of a cell with a Carnot engine, which is the most thermodynamically perfect machine.…
Statistical modeling of physical laws connects experiments with mathematical descriptions of natural phenomena. The modeling is based on the probability density of measured variables expressed by experimental data via a kernel estimator. As…
This paper aims to overcome a major obstacle in scaling RL for reasoning with LLMs, namely the collapse of policy entropy. Such phenomenon is consistently observed across vast RL runs without entropy intervention, where the policy entropy…
During a spontaneous change, a macroscopic physical system will evolve towards a macro-state with more realizations. This observation is at the basis of the Statistical Mechanical version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and it provides…
The entanglement properties of systems in which elastic and inelastic reactions occur in projectile-target interactions is studied. A new measure of entanglement, the scattering entropy, based on the unitarity of the $S-$matrix (probability…
In this work we apply Wang-Landau simulations to a simple model which has exact solutions both in the microcanonical and canonical formalisms. The simulations were carried out by using an updated version of the Wang-Landau sampling. We…
Innovations across science and industry are evaluated using randomized trials (a.k.a. A/B tests). While simple and robust, such static designs are inefficient or infeasible for testing many hypotheses. Adaptive designs can greatly improve…
We report experimental evidence that a polymer stretched at constant strain rate $\dot\lambda$ presents complex memory effects after that $\dot\lambda$ is set to zero at a specific strain $\lambda_w$ for a duration $t_w$, ranging from…
The stochastic entropy generated during the evolution of a system interacting with an environment may be separated into three components, but only two of these have a non-negative mean. The third component of entropy production is…
The science of thermodynamics was put together in the Nineteenth Century to describe large systems in equilibrium. One part of thermodynamics defines entropy for equilibrium systems and demands an ever-increasing entropy for non-equilibrium…
We discuss how the method of maximum entropy, MaxEnt, can be extended beyond its original scope, as a rule to assign a probability distribution, to a full-fledged method for inductive inference. The main concept is the (relative) entropy…
Reptation theory has been highly successful in explaining the unusual material properties of entangled polymer solutions. It reduces the complex many-body dynamics to a single-polymer description where each polymer is envisaged to be…
A liquid surface touching a solid usually deforms in a near-wall meniscus region. In this work, we replace part of the free surface with a soft polymer and examine the shape of this elasto-capillary meniscus, result of the interplay between…
Entanglement entropy has become an important theoretical concept in condensed matter physics, because it provides a unique tool for characterizing quantum mechanical many-body phases and new kinds of quantum order. However, the experimental…
Using canonical Monte Carlo simulations, we introduce a new numerical procedure for comparing the entropic exponents of polymers with different constraints and/or topologies. Setting up competitions between polymer segments which can…
The length-scale dependence of the dynamic entropy is studied in a molecular dynamics simulation of a binary Lennard-Jones liquid above the mode-coupling critical temperature $T_c$. A number of methods exist for estimating the entropy of…
Motivated by understanding the emergence of thermodynamic restoring forces and oscillations, we develop a quantum-mechanical model of a bath of spins coupled to the elasticity of a material. We show our model reproduces the behavior of a…
Athermal (i.e. zero-temperature) under-constrained systems are typically floppy, but they can be rigidified by the application of external strain, which is theoretically well understood. Here and in the companion paper, we extend this…