Related papers: Is the statement of Murphy's Law valid?
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…
Second law of thermodynamics can be apparently violated for systems whose dynamics depends on acquired information by measurement. However, when one consider measurement and erasure process together along with the system it saves the second…
It is shown that the laws of thermodynamics are extremely robust under generalizations of the form of entropy. Using the Bregman-type relative entropy, the Clausius inequality is proved to be always valid. This implies that thermodynamics…
I argue here that both the first and second laws of thermodynamics, generally understood to be quintessentially physical in nature, can be equally well described as being about certain types of information without the need to invoke…
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…
The second law of thermodynamics, which deals with irreversibility and makes the theory so special, is usually considered empirical. The definition of equilibrium as an attractor, on the other hand, requires a postulate. This article shows…
Dual phase lag equation for heat conduction is analyzed from the point of view of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Its first order Taylor series expansion is consistent with the second law as long as the two relaxation times are not…
The Fluctuation Theorem describes the probability ratio of observing trajectories that satisfy or violate the second law of thermodynamics. It has been proved in a number of different ways for thermostatted deterministic nonequilibrium…
A generalized version of the Maximum Work Theorem is valid when the system is initially not at thermal equilibrium. In this work, we initially study the fraction of trajectories that violate this generalized theorem for a two simple…
An apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics occurs when an atom coupled to a zero-temperature bath, being necessarily in an excited state, is used to extract work from the bath. Here the fallacy is that it takes work to couple…
The principle of least action seems not to lead to equations describing the motion consistent with the physical behaviour, for non-holonomic constraints. Here, a response is proposed for this fundamental problem in Mathematical Physics.…
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…
We investigate the laws of thermodynamics in an accelerating universe driven by dark energy with a time-dependent equation of state. In the case we consider that the physically relevant part of the Universe is that envelopped by the…
Newton's second law has limited scope of application when transient phenomena are present. We consider a modification of Newton's second law in order to take into account a sudden change (surge) of angular momentum or linear momentum. We…
Landauer's "principle" claims that erasing one bit of information necessarily dissipates at least Tln2 of heat into the surroundings, making a possibly logically irreversible operation also thermodynamically irreversible. It is commonly…
We show that the conservation and the non-additivity of the information, together with the additivity of the entropy make the entropy increase in an isolated system. The collapse of the entangled quantum state offers an example of the…
Many fruitful analogies have emerged between the theories of quantum entanglement and thermodynamics, motivating the pursuit of an axiomatic description of entanglement akin to the laws of thermodynamics. A long-standing open problem has…
The explanation of the apparent universality of thermodynamics points toward the extension of the usual conceptual background of the second law. Arguments are collected that a basic guiding idea of stability of thermodynamic equilibrium…
The status of the sociophysics is discussed as placed between the physics and the sociology. In particular we ask if the second law of thermodynamics can be useful in social sciences.
In a recent Note (Am. J. Phys. 92:397, 2024; arXiv:2309.10826), Vallejo and Bove provide a physical argument based nominally on the second law of thermodynamics as a way of resolving the mathematical question appearing in the title. A…