Related papers: Boltzmann Bridges
This paper is a non-technical, informal presentation of our theory of the second law of thermodynamics as a law that is independent of statistical mechanics and that is derivable solely from certain simple assumptions about adiabatic…
I argue here that both the first and second laws of thermodynamics, generally understood to be quintessentially physical in nature, can be equally well described as being about certain types of information without the need to invoke…
Many complex systems are characterized by non-Boltzmann distribution functions of their statistical variables. If one wants to -- justified or not -- hold on to the maximum entropy principle for complex statistical systems (non-Boltzmann)…
We generalize the second law of thermodynamics in its maximum work formulation for a nonequilibrium initial distribution. It is found that in an isothermal process, the Boltzmann relative entropy (H-function) is not just a Lyapunov function…
We give a short review of the recent developments of entropic cosmology based on two thermodynamic laws of the apparent horizon, namely the first and the second laws of thermodynamics. The first law essentially provides the change of the…
We calculate the net change in generalized entropy occurring when one carries out the gedanken experiment in which a box initially containing energy $E$, entropy $S$ and charge $Q$ is lowered adiabatically toward a Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m…
The article presents new entropic continuity bounds for conditional expectations and conditional covariance matrices. These bounds are expressed in terms of the relative entropy between different coupling distributions. Our approach…
A geometric foundation thermo-statistics is presented with the only axiomatic assumption of Boltzmann's principle S(E,N,V)=k\ln W. This relates the entropy to the geometric area e^{S(E,N,V)/k} of the manifold of constant energy in the…
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…
I will argue, pace a great many of my contemporaries, that there's something right about Boltzmann's attempt to ground the second law of thermodynamics in a suitably amended deterministic time-reversal invariant classical dynamics, and that…
Time-asymmetric behavior as embodied in the second law of thermodynamics is observed in {\it individual macroscopic} systems. It can be understood as arising naturally from time-symmetric microscopic laws when account is taken of a) the…
We study the statistical underpinnings of life. We question some common assumptions about the thermodynamics of life and illustrate how, contrary to widespread belief, even in a closed system entropy growth can accompany an increase in…
We extend stochastic thermodynamics by relaxing the two assumptions that the Markovian dynamics must be linear and that the equilibrium distribution must be a Boltzmann distribution. We show that if we require the second law to hold when…
Development of thermodynamic induction up to second order gives a dynamical bifurcation for thermodynamic variables and allows for the prediction and detailed explanation of nonequilibrium phase transitions with associated spontaneous…
Assuming that the universe is a system obedient to known thermodynamic laws and equations, here we explore whether it is a possibility for the universe to exist and evolve without any cosmic structure or force necessarily emerging within…
We investigate the laws of thermodynamics in an accelerating universe driven by dark energy with a time-dependent equation of state. In the case we consider that the physically relevant part of the Universe is that envelopped by the…
Given a normalized state-vector $\psi $, we define the conditional expectation $\mathbb{E }_{\psi } (A | B ) $ of a Hermitian operator $A $ with respect to a strongly commuting family of self-adjoint operators $B $ as the best…
For a small driven system coupled strongly to a heat bath, internal energy and exchanged heat are identified such that they obey the usual additive form of the first law. By identifying this exchanged heat with the entropy change of the…
On the one hand, the dissipated heat of a thermodynamic work extraction process upper bounds the non-predictive information, which the associated system encodes about its environment. Thus, emergent information processing capabilities can…
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…