Related papers: How causation is rooted into thermodynamics

We employ the law of increasing entropy and the assumption about the decrease of the ground state energy to answer the question what are the reasons of the Big Bang and the origin of the Universe.

Causality is a subject of philosophical debate and a central scientific issue with a long history. In the statistical domain, the study of cause and effect based on the notion of `fairness' in comparisons dates back several hundred years,…

Why do quantum evolutions occur and why do they stop at certain points? In classical thermodynamics affinity was introduced to predict in which direction an irreversible process proceeds. In this paper the quantum mechanical counterpart of…

Classical thermodynamics is unrivalled in its range of applications and relevance to everyday life. It enables a description of complex systems, made up of microscopic particles, in terms of a small number of macroscopic quantities, such as…

Exposing a solution to a temperature gradient can lead to the accumulation of particles on either the cold or warm side. This phenomenon, known as thermophoresis, has been discovered more than a century ago, and yet its microscopic origin…

Thermodynamic relations are derived from first principles of mechanics for non-equilibrium processes. Since the key role herein is played by the law of increase of entropy, the latter is analyzed at first. It is shown that its derivation…

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, to make clear (and de-mystify) the basic concepts of classical thermodynamics, and thus to enable the integration of thermodynamics within systems modeling and control. Second, to demonstrate…

We give meaning to the first and second laws of thermodynamics in case of mesoscopic out-of-equilibrium systems which are driven by diffusion processes. The notion of the entropy production is analyzed. The role of the Helmholtz extremum…

It is often claimed that one cannot locate a notion of causation in fundamental physical theories. The reason most commonly given is that the dynamics of those theories do not support any distinction between the past and the future, and…

It is shown that the force in relativistic mechanics is not only the cause of acceleration of particle relative to an inertial frame of reference, but also the cause of change of the course of time along the particle's trajectory. Therein…

With the discussion of three examples, we aim at clarifying the concept of energy transfer associated with dissipation in mechanics and in thermodynamics. The dissipation effects due to dissipative forces, such as the friction force between…

Multiscale thermodynamics is a theory of relations among levels of description. Energy and entropy are its two main ingredients. Their roles in the time evolution describing approach of a level (starting level) to another level involving…

Thermodynamics is usually developed starting from entropy and the maximum entropy principle. We investigate here to what extent one can replace entropy with relative entropy which has several advantages, for example in the context of local…

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…

Causality is one of the most fundamental -- and yet elusive -- concepts in physics. From its intuitive role in everyday experience to its formal and often implicit role in scientific theories, causality has challenged philosophers and…

Thermodynamics is based on the notions of energy and entropy. While energy is the elementary quantity governing physical dynamics, entropy is the fundamental concept in information theory. In this work, starting from first principles, we…

Determining and measuring cause-effect relationships is fundamental to most scientific studies of natural phenomena. The notion of causation is distinctly different from correlation which only looks at association of trends or patterns in…

We address causal reasoning in multivariate time series data generated by stochastic processes. Existing approaches are largely restricted to static settings, ignoring the continuity and emission of variations across time. In contrast, we…

We study nonequilibrium thermodynamics of complex information flows induced by interactions between multiple fluctuating systems. Characterizing nonequilibrium dynamics by causal networks (i.e., Bayesian networks), we obtain novel…

This contribution analyses the classical laws of motion by means of an approach relating time and entropy. We argue that adopting the notion of change of states as opposed to the usual derivation of Newton's laws in terms of fields a…