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Related papers: Entropy? Honest!

200 papers

We first present open questions related to the foundations of thermodynamics and statistical physics. We then argue that in principle one can not have "closed systems", and that a universal background should exist. We propose that the…

Condensed Matter · Physics 2009-10-31 Eshel Ben-Jacob , Ziv Hermon , Alexsander Shnirman

We review with a tutorial scope the information theory foundations of quantum statistical physics. Only a small proportion of the variables that characterize a system at the microscopic scale can be controlled, for both practical and…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 R. Balian

This paper is the second part of a previous paper (Marquet, 2019) dealing with the need to define the entropy with an absolute way, by using the third law of thermodynamics. In this second part it is shown that there is a need and interest…

Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics · Physics 2019-12-02 Pascal Marquet

The third law of thermodynamics dictates that the entropy of materials becomes zero as temperature ($T$) approaches zero. Contrarily, glass and other similar materials exhibit nonzero entropy at $T=0$, which contradicts the third law. For…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-02-25 Koun Shirai

Why can the world resist the law of entropy increase and produce self-organizing structure? Does the entropy of an isolated system always only increase and never decrease? Can be thermodymamic degradation and self-organizing evolution…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-10-26 Xiu-San Xing

Within an inherently classical perspective, there is always an unavoidable energy cost associated with the information deletion and this common lore is at the heart of the Landauer's conjecture that does not impose, per se, any relevant…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-07-15 Massimo Giovannini

The routine definitions of both entropy, and differential entropy show inconsistencies that make them not reciprocally coherent. We propose a few possible modifications of these quantities so that 1) they no longer show incongruities, 2)…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2014-08-08 Nicola Cufaro Petroni

In this tutorial we review the essential arguments behing entropic inference. We focus on the epistemological notion of information and its relation to the Bayesian beliefs of rational agents. The problem of updating from a prior to a…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2015-05-20 Ariel Caticha

This paper is a review of a particular approach to the method of maximum entropy as a general framework for inference. The discussion emphasizes the pragmatic elements in the derivation. An epistemic notion of information is defined in…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2021-08-04 Ariel Caticha

The total entropy production fluctuations are studied in some exactly solvable models. For these systems, the detailed fluctuation theorem holds even in the transient state, provided initially the system is prepared in thermal equilibrium.…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-08-08 Arnab Saha , Sourabh Lahiri , A. M. Jayannavar

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,…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2016-10-14 Marius Oltean , Luca Bonetti , Alessandro D. A. M. Spallicci , Carlos F. Sopuerta

The proper definition of entropy is fundamental to the relationship between statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. It also plays a major role in the recent debate about the validity of the concept of negative temperature. In this paper,…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-11-18 Robert H. Swendsen

Entropy plays a crucial role in characterization of information and entanglement, but it is not a scalar quantity and for many systems it is different for different relativistic observers. Loop quantum gravity predicts the…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2015-06-25 Daniel R. Terno

The notion of software entropy is often invoked to describe the tendency of software systems to become increasingly disordered as they evolve, yet existing approaches to quantify it are largely heuristic. In this work we introduce a formal…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Jerónimo Fotinós , Juan B. Cabral

Given a knowledge base KB containing first-order and statistical facts, we consider a principled method, called the random-worlds method, for computing a degree of belief that some formula Phi holds given KB. If we are reasoning about a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2009-09-25 A. J. Grove , J. Y. Halpern , D. Koller

We construct a complete set of Wannier functions which are localized at both given positions and momenta. This allows us to introduce the quantum phase space, onto which a quantum pure state can be mapped unitarily. Using its probability…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-06-10 Xizhi Han , Biao Wu

Two identities in statistical mechanics involving entropy differences (or ratios of density of states) at constant energy are derived. The first provides a nontrivial extension of the Jarzynski equality to the microcanonical ensemble [C.…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-11-10 Artur B. Adib

Quantum information-theoretic approach has been identified as a way to understand the foundations of quantum mechanics as early as 1950 due to Shannon. However there hasn't been enough advancement or rigorous development of the subject. In…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2018-07-04 Shubhayan Sarkar

The recent article "Entropic Updating of Probability and Density Matrices" [1] derives and demonstrates the inferential origins of both the standard and quantum relative entropies in unison. Operationally, the standard and quantum relative…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2017-10-31 Kevin Vanslette

Although the third law of thermodynamics was established almost a century ago, it is not yet universally considered to be a fundamental law of physics. A major problem is that there are many materials having residual entropy. Amorphous…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2018-12-24 Koun Shirai