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Since Newton, all classical and quantum physics depends upon the "Newtonian Paradigm". Here the relevant variables of the system are identified. The boundary conditions creating the phase space of all possible values of the variables are…
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…
Newton set the stage for our view of how science should be done. We remain in what I will call the `Newtonian Paradigm' in all of physics, including Newton, Einstein, and Schrodinger. As I will show shortly, Newton invented and bequeathed…
Life is a planetary feature that depends on its environment, but it has also strongly shaped the physical conditions on Earth, having created conditions highly suitable for a productive biosphere. Clearly, the second law of thermodynamics…
The second law of thermodynamics places a limitation into which states a system can evolve into. For systems in contact with a heat bath, it can be combined with the law of energy conservation, and it says that a system can only evolve into…
Every production-recycling iteration accumulates an inevitable proportion of its matter-energy in the environment, lest the production process itself would be a system in perpetual motion, violating the second law of Thermodynamics. Such…
According to the second law of thermodynamics, the arrow of time points to an ever increasing entropy of the Universe. However, exactly how the entropy evolves with time and what drives the growth remain largely unknown. Here, for the first…
When thermodynamics is understood as the science (or art) of constructing effective models of natural phenomena by choosing a minimal level of description capable of capturing the essential features of the physical reality of interest, the…
Motivated by the notion that the mathematics of gravity can be reproduced from a statistical requirement of maximal entropy, we study the consequence of introducing an entropic source term in the Einstein-Hilbert action. For a spatially…
The second law of thermodynamics states that for a thermally isolated system entropy never decreases. Most physical processes we observe in nature involve variations of macroscopic quantities over spatial and temporal scales much larger…
It exists a large class of systems for which the traditional notion of extensivity breaks down. From experimental examples we induce two general hypothesis concerning such systems. In the first the existence of an internal coordinate system…
Several recent investigations have shown that there is a holographic relationship between the bulk degrees of freedom and the surface degrees of freedom in the spacetime. Furthermore, the entropy on the horizon can produce an entropic force…
The second law of thermodynamics constitutes a fundamental principle of physics, precluding the existence of perpetual motion machines and providing a natural definition of the arrow of time. Its scope extends across virtually all areas of…
I use cosmology examples to illustrate that the second law of thermodynamics is not old and tired, but alive and kicking, continuing to stimulate interesting research on really big puzzles. The question "Why is the entropy so low?" (despite…
The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system can only increase over time. This appears to conflict with the reversible evolution of isolated quantum systems under the Schr\"odinger equation, which preserves…
The population dynamics and stability of ecosystems of interacting species is studied from the perspective of non-equilibrium thermodynamics by assuming that species, through their biotic and abiotic interactions, are units of entropy…
The universal validity of the second law of thermodynamics is widely attributed to a finely tuned initial condition of the universe. This creates a problem: why is the universe atypical? We suggest that the problem is an artefact created by…
We take the view that the standard von Neumann definition, in which the entropy $S^{vN}$ of a pure state is zero, is in evident conflict with the statement of the second law that the entropy of the universe $S_{univ}$ increases in…
The dynamics of molecular collisions in a macroscopic body are encoded by the parameter Thermodynamic entropy - a statistical measure of the number of molecular configurations that correspond to a given macrostate. Directionality in the…
The 2nd law of thermodynamics is used to shed light on present-day puzzles in cosmology. The universal law, given as an equation of motion, describes diverse systems when consuming free energy via various mechanisms to attain stationary…