Related papers: Lost work and exergy: two views of the same concep…
Entropy is a concept that has traditionally been reliant on a definite notion of causality. However, without a definite notion of causality, the concept of entropy is not all lost. Indefinite causal structure results from combining…
When a system is perturbed by the variation of external parameters, a lag generally develops between the actual state of the system and the equilibrium state corresponding to the current parameter values. We establish a microscopic,…
The more precise definition and the more fundamental understanding of the concepts of time, energy, entropy and information are building upon the new, relativistic foundation of gravity. This lecture is an attempt to explain the basic…
The entropy produced when a quantum system is driven away from equilibrium can be decomposed in two parts, one related with populations and the other with quantum coherences. The latter is usually based on the so-called relative entropy of…
We demonstrate that irreversibility arises from the principle of microscopic reversibility and the presence of memory in the time evolution of a single copy of a system driven by a protocol. We introduce microscopic reversibility by using…
This paper presents a conceptual model describing the medium and long-term co-evolution of natural and socio-economic subsystems of Earth. An economy is viewed as an out-of-equilibrium dissipative structure that can only be maintained with…
I critically examine the notion of ``irreversibility,'' and discuss in what sense it applies to the spontaneous creation of particles in external fields. The investigation reveals that particle creation in very strong fields can only be…
Entropy production (EP) is known as a fundamental quantity for measuring the irreversibility of processes in thermal equilibrium and states far from equilibrium. In stochastic thermodynamics, the EP becomes more visible in terms of the…
Landauer's erasure principle exposes an intrinsic relation between thermodynamics and information theory: the erasure of information stored in a system, S, requires an amount of work proportional to the entropy of that system. This entropy,…
Natural resource use and waste production, disposal, and reuse in human economies are treated in their economic, technological and thermodynamic aspects. The physical nature of economic production, consumption, saving, and waste is compared…
Emergence (macro-level effects from micro-level causes) is at the heart of the conflict between reductionism and functionalism. How can there be autonomous higher level laws of nature (the functionalist claim) if everything can be reduced…
The work done when a system at thermal equilibrium is externally driven by a unitary control parameter leads to irreversible entropy production. The entropy produced can be thought of as a combination of coherence generation and a…
Given entropy's central role in multiple areas of physics and science, one important task is to develop a systematic and unifying approach to defining entropy. Games of chance become a natural candidate for characterising the uncertainty of…
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…
Entropy is arguably one of the most powerful concepts to understand the world, from the behavior of molecules to the expansion of the universe, from how life emerges to how hybrid complex systems like cities come into being and continue…
The rate of entropy production by a stochastic process quantifies how far it is from thermodynamic equilibrium. Equivalently, entropy production captures the degree to which detailed balance and time-reversal symmetry are broken. Despite…
We present a critical analysis of the classical approaches to energy subjects, based on the work-energy theorem and the conservation of mechanical energy proposed in the courses of the first years of tertiary education. We show how these…
Even today, the concept of entropy is perceived by many as quite obscure. The main difficulty is analyzed as being fundamentally due to the subjectivity and anthropocentrism of the concept that prevent us to have a sufficient distance to…
The perception of the value and propriety of modern engineered systems is changing. In addition to their functional and extra-functional properties, nowadays' systems are also evaluated by their sustainability properties. The next…
The extropy is a measure of information introduced by Lad et al. (2015) as dual to entropy. As the entropy, it is a shift-independent information measure. We introduce here the notion of weighted extropy, a shift-dependent information…