Related papers: A New Thermodynamics Featuring the Arrow in Time
The nature of time has beguiled philosophers for nearly three millennia. There are myriad types of time including cosmological time, biological time, psychological time, physical time, historical time, and even theological time. My brief…
The crucial role of ambient correlations in determining thermodynamic behavior is established. A class of entangled states of two macroscopic systems is constructed such that each component is in a state of thermal equilibrium at a given…
The mechanism by which thermodynamics sets the direction of time's arrow has long fascinated scientists. Here, we show that a machine learning algorithm can learn to discern the direction of time's arrow when provided with a system's…
The recent surge of interest in the origin of the temporal asymmetry of thermodynamical systems (including the accessible part of the universe itself) put forward two possible explanatory approaches to this age-old problem. Hereby we show…
This paper presents a unified formulation of the origin of the arrow of time in classical and quantum mechanics. We begin with a mechanical analysis of a one-dimensional three-particle system, which provides a concrete example in which…
The aim of this article is to analyze the relation between the second law of thermodynamics and the so-called arrow of time. For this purpose, a number of different aspects in this arrow of time are distinguished, in particular those of…
The only widely accepted explanation for the various arrows of time that everywhere and at all epochs point in the same direction is the `past hypothesis': the Universe had a very special low-entropy initial state. We present the first…
Consider a Hamiltonian system that consists of a slow subsystem S and a fast subsystem F. The autonomous dynamics of S is driven by an effective Hamiltonian, but its thermodynamics is unexpected. We show that a well-defined thermodynamic…
This essay offers a meta-level analysis in the sociology and history of physics in the context of the so-called "Arrow of Time Problem" or "Two Times Problem," which asserts that the empirically observed directionality of time is in…
This is the first of five papers comprising The Semantic Arrow of Time. The argument begins with a claim: computing's arrow of time is semantic, not thermodynamic. The direction in which meaning is preserved or destroyed across transactions…
In [Sch05a], it is argued that Boltzmann's intuition, that the psychological arrow of time is necessarily aligned with the thermodynamic arrow, is correct. Schulman gives an explicit physical mechanism for this connection, based on the…
In any physical theory that admits true indeterminism, the thermodynamic arrow of time can arise regardless of the system's initial conditions. Hence on such theories time's arrow emerges out of the basic physical interactions. The example…
The puzzle of the thermodynamic arrow of time reduces to the question of how the universe could have had lower entropy in the past. I show that no special entropy lowering mechanism (or fluctuation) is necessary. As a consequence of…
It is common for most people to think of science and art as disparate, or at most only vaguely related fields. In physics, one of the biggest successes of thermodynamics is its explanation of order arising from disordered phases of matter…
Deriving an arrow of time from time-reversal symmetric microscopic dynamics is a fundamental open problem in many areas of physics, ranging from cosmology, to particle physics, to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. Here we focus on…
The arrow of time is an irreversible phenomenon for a system of particles undergoing reversible dynamics. Since the time of Boltzmann to this day, the arrow of time has led to debate and research. However, the enormous growth of…
In both thermodynamics and quantum mechanics the arrow of time is characterized by the statistical likelihood of physical processes. We characterize this arrow of time for the continuous quantum measurement dynamics of a superconducting…
Uncovering the origin of the arrow of time remains a fundamental scientific challenge. Within the framework of statistical physics, this problem was inextricably associated with the second law of thermodynamics, which declares that entropy…
The arrow of time dilemma: the laws of physics are invariant for time inversion, whereas the familiar phenomena we see everyday are not (i.e. entropy increases). I show that, within a quantum mechanical framework, all phenomena which leave…
A profound quest of statistical mechanics is the origin of irreversibility - the arrow of time. New stimulants have been provided, thanks to unprecedented degree of control reached in experiments with isolated quantum systems and rapid…