Related papers: What Gibbsian Statistical Mechanics Says: Defendin…
Gibbsian statistical mechanics (GSM) is the most widely used version of statistical mechanics among working physicists. Yet a closer look at GSM reveals that it is unclear what the theory actually says and how it bears on experimental…
In a recent article, Werndl and Frigg discuss the relationship between the Boltzmannian and Gibbsian framework of statistical mechanics, addressing in particular the question when equilibrium values calculated in both frameworks agree. In…
Gibbsian statistical mechanics is extended into the domain of non-negligible {though non-specified} correlations in phase space while respecting the fundamental laws of thermodynamics. The appropriate Gibbsian probability distribution is…
There is no compelling reason imposing that the methods of statistical mechanics should be restricted to the dynamical systems which follow the usual Boltzmann-Gibbs prescriptions. More specifically, ubiquitous natural and artificial…
The purpose of this work is to expand and clarify the concept of the class of Gibbs random fields and give its structure the form accepted in the theory of random processes. It is possible thanks to the proposed purely probabilistic…
Through extended consideration of two wide classes of case studies -- dilute gases and linear systems -- I explore the ways in which assumptions of probability and irreversibility occur in contemporary statistical mechanics, where the…
We defend a new theory of statistical evidence, which we call Robust Bayesianism (RB). We prove that, under widely accepted assumptions, RB entails the law of likelihood [Royall, 1997], the likelihood principle [Berger and Wolpert, 1988],…
This is a short manuscript which was initially submitted to Nature Physics as a comment to the PBR (Pusey, M. F., Barrett, J., Rudolph, T) paper just after its publication in 2012. The comment was not accepted. I however think that the…
We generalize classical statistical mechanics to describe the kinematics and the dynamics of systems whose variables are constrained by a single quantum postulate (discreteness of the spectrum of values of at least one variable of the…
Physicists have, hitherto, mostly adopted a frequentist conception of probability, according to which probability statements apply only to ensembles. It is argued that we should, instead, adopt an epistemic, or Bayesian conception, in which…
We will discuss the link between scientific explanations and probabilities, specially in relationship with statistical mechanics and the derivation of macroscopic laws from microscopic ones.
We propose a generalisation of Gibbs' statistical mechanics into the domain of non-negligible phase space correlations. Derived are the probability distribution and entropy as a generalised ensemble average, replacing…
In statistical mechanics, the generally called Stirling approximation is actually an approximation of Stirling's formula. In this article, it is shown that the term that is dropped is in fact the one that takes fluctuations into account.…
J. Willard Gibbs' Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics was the definitive work of one of America's greatest physicists. Gibbs' book on statistical mechanics establishes the basic principles and fundamental results that have…
Bayesian inference systems should be able to explain their reasoning to users, translating from numerical to natural language. Previous empirical work has investigated the correspondence between absolute probabilities and linguistic…
Criticisms of so called `subjective probability' come on the one hand from those who maintain that probability in physics has only a frequentistic interpretation, and, on the other, from those who tend to `objectivise' Bayesian theory,…
We discuss Birnbaum's result, its relevance to statistical reasoning, Mayo's objections and the result in [Electron. J. Statist. 7 (2013) 2645-2655] that the proof of this result doesn't establish what is commonly believed.…
Without attempting to summarize the vast field of statistical mechanics, we briefly mention some of the progress that was made in areas which have enjoyed Barry Simon's interests. In particular, we focus on rigorous non-perturbative results…
Recent results suggest that quantum mechanical phenomena may be interpreted as a failure of standard probability theory and may be described by a Bayesian complex probability theory.
The probability representation of states in standard quantum mechanics where the quantum states are associated with fair probability distributions (instead of wave function or density matrix) is shortly commented and bibliography related to…