Related papers: Physically Impossible?
This article derives prognostic expressions for the evolution of globally aggregated economic wealth, productivity, inflation, technological change, innovation and growth. The approach is to treat civilization as an open, non-equilibrium…
We revisit the concavity property of the thermodynamic entropy in order to formulate a general proof of the minimum energy principle as well as of other equivalent extremum principles that are valid for thermodynamic potentials and…
We introduce the idea of weakly coherent collisional models, where the elements of an environment interacting with a system of interest are prepared in states that are approximately thermal, but have an amount of coherence proportional to a…
Concepts of everyday use like energy, heat, and temperature have acquired a precise meaning after the development of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics provides the basis for understanding how heat and work are related and with the general…
We study thermodynamic limits when controllers operate with only partial observability of internal correlations in multipartite systems. Understanding the costs imposed by lack of information is crucial in settings where agents must act…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
Conventional statistical mechanics describes large systems and averages over many particles or over many trials. But work, heat, and entropy impact the small scales that experimentalists can increasingly control, e.g., in single-molecule…
It is a central question in quantum thermodynamics to determine how irreversible is a process that transforms an initial state $\rho$ to a final state $\sigma$, and whether such irreversibility can be thought of as a useful resource. For…
In many real-world situations, there are constraints on the ways in which a physical system can be manipulated. We investigate the entropy production (EP) and extractable work involved in bringing a system from some initial distribution $p$…
We investigate extreme value theory for physical systems with a global conservation law which describe renewal processes, mass transport models and long-range interacting spin models. As shown previously, a special feature is that the…
In economics, construction of perfect models in a way that would be comparable to the standards customary in physical sciences is generally not feasible. In particular, the observed value for an economic equilibrium may deviate…
Entropy production is a key quantity in any finite-time thermodynamic process. It is intimately tied with the fundamental laws of thermodynamics, embodying a tool to extend thermodynamic considerations all the way to non-equilibrium…
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…
The thermodynamic limit of the internal energy and the entropy of the system of quantum interacting particles in random medium is shown to exist under the crucial requirements of stability and temperedness of interactions. The energy turns…
This paper offers a pedestrian guide from the fundamental properties of entropy to the axioms of thermodynamics, which are a consequence of the axiom of statistical physics. It also dismantles flawed concepts, such as assigning physical…
The approach to a substantiation of thermodynamics is offered. A conservative system of interacting elements, which is not in equilibrium, is used as a model. This system is then split into small subsystems that are accepted as being in…
We discuss some features of thermodynamics in the presence of multiple conserved quantities. We prove a generalisation of Landauer principle illustrating tradeoffs between the erasure costs paid in different "currencies". We then show how…
The past twenty years have seen a resurgence of interest in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, thanks to advances in the theory of stochastic processes and in their thermodynamic interpretation. Fluctuation theorems provide fundamental…
Extremal principles can generally be divided into two rather distinct classes. There are, on the one hand side, formulations based on the Lagrangian or Hamiltonian mechanics, respectively, dealing with time dependent problems, but…
Extremal principles are fundamental in our interpretation of phenomena in nature. One of the best known examples is the second law of thermodynamics, governing most physical and chemical systems and stating the continuous increase of…