Related papers: Mixing indistinguishable systems leads to a quantu…
It is shown that the Gibbs paradox is actually paralogism, viz. an erroneous statement sounding credible due to the statistic-mechanical interpretation of entropy as a measure of "any and all" irreversibility. As an alternative, the…
The Gibbs paradox has frequently been interpreted as a sign that particles of the same kind are fundamentally indistinguishable; and that quantum mechanics, with its identical fermions and bosons, is indispensable for making sense of this.…
Defining the entropy of classical particles raises a number of paradoxes and ambiguities, some of which have been known for over a century. Several, such as Gibbs' paradox, involve the fact that classical particles are distinguishable, and…
It is well known that, in the context of General Relativity, some spacetimes, when described by a congruence of comoving observers, may consist in a distribution of a perfect (non-dissipative) fluid, whereas the same spacetime as seen by a…
The suggestion that particles of the same kind may be indistinguishable in a fundamental sense, even so that challenges to traditional notions of individuality and identity may arise, has first come up in the context of classical…
The article reveals the error that in classical thermodynamics leads to the Gibbs paradox. The essence of the error lies in the fact that the entropy of an ideal gas is attributed to additive quantities, but it is not correct. The value of…
Based on a reconsideration of the Gibbs paradox, we show that a residual, non-extensive term in entropy turns up upon mixing identical particles, whether they are indistinguishable or not. The positive contribution from this residual…
We develop the framework of classical Observational entropy, which is a mathematically rigorous and precise framework for non-equilibrium thermodynamics, explicitly defined in terms of a set of observables. Observational entropy can be seen…
As no heat effect and mechanical work are observed, we have a simple experimental resolution of the Gibbs paradox: both the thermodynamic entropy of mixing and the Gibbs free energy change are zero during the formation of any ideal…
The standard theory of ideal gases ignores the interaction of the gas particles with the thermal radiation (photon gas) that fills the otherwise vacuum space between them. This is an unphysical feature of the theory since every material in…
The reversibility and recurrence paradoxes are key issues that have been left unsolved in researches on the foundation of thermodynamics since the 19th century. This article shows that (1) the reversibility paradox can be overcome if we pay…
Doubts are raised concerning the usual interpretation of the alleged failure, by quantum mechanics, of the distributive law of classical logic. The difficulty raised by incompatible sets of observables is overcome within an epistemic…
Recently a number of approaches has been developed to connect the microscopic dynamics of particle systems to the macroscopic properties of systems in nonequilibrium stationary states, via the theory of dynamical systems. This way a direct…
In this chapter we address the topic of quantum thermodynamics in the presence of additional observables beyond the energy of the system. In particular we discuss the special role that the generalized Gibbs ensemble plays in this theory,…
The standard theory of ideal gases ignores the interaction of the gas particles with the thermal radiation (photon gas) that fills the otherwise vacuum space between them. This is an unphysical feature since every material absorbs and…
This is a systematic review of the concept of indistinguishability in both classical and quantum mechanics, with particular attention to Gibbs' paradox. Section 1 is on the Gibbs paradox; section 2 is a defense of the concept of classical…
Molecular collision within an ideal gas originates from an intrinsic short-range repulsive interaction. The collision reduces the average accessible physical space for a single molecule and this has a direct consequence on the entropy of…
In this paper, we analyze the relationship between entropy and information in the context of the mixing process of two identical ideal gases. We will argue that entropy has a special information-based feature that is enfolded in the…
Our knowledge of quantum mechanics can satisfactorily describe simple, microscopic systems, but is yet to explain the macroscopic everyday phenomena we observe. Here we aim to shed some light on the quantum-to-classical transition as seen…
Gibbs states are familiar from statistical mechanics, yet their use is not limited to that domain. For instance, they also feature in the maximum entropy reconstruction of quantum states from incomplete measurement data. Outside the…