Related papers: The Causal Second Law
Many legal cases require decisions about causality, responsibility or blame, and these may be based on statistical data. However, causal inferences from such data are beset by subtle conceptual and practical difficulties, and in general it…
We review with a tutorial scope the information theory foundations of quantum statistical physics. Only a small proportion of the variables that characterize a system at the microscopic scale can be controlled, for both practical and…
In Entropy 24, 83 (2022) [1], titled "The Law of Entropy Increase and the Meissner Effect", A. Nikulov claims that the Meissner effect exhibited by type I superconductors violates the second law of thermodynamics. Contrary to this claim, I…
We apply the generalized second law of thermodynamics to discriminate among quantum corrections (whether logarithmic or power-law) to the entropy of the apparent horizon in spatially Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universes. We use the…
We investigate the structure common to causal theories that attempt to explain a (part of) the world. Causality implies conservation of identity, itself a far from simple notion. It imposes strong demands on the universalizing power of the…
Existing tools for explaining complex models and systems are associational rather than causal and do not provide mechanistic understanding. We propose a new notion called counterfactual explainability for causal attribution that is…
According to thermodynamics, the inevitable increase of entropy allows the past to be distinguished from the future. From this perspective, any clock must incorporate an irreversible process that allows this flow of entropy to be tracked.…
The letter submitted is an executive summary of our previous paper. To solve the Einstein Podolsky Rosen 'paradox' the two boundary quantum mechanics is taken as self consistent interpretation of quantum dynamics. The difficulty with this…
In recent years we have witnessed a concentrated effort to make sense of thermodynamics for small-scale systems. One of the main difficulties is to capture a suitable notion of work that models realistically the purpose of quantum machines,…
Completely positive trace preserving maps are essential for the formulation of the second law of thermodynamics. The dynamics of quantum systems, correlated with their environments, are in general not described by such maps. We explore how…
We give a simple proof of the uncertainty principle with quantum side information, as in [Berta et al. Nature Physics 6, 659 (2010)], invoking the monotonicity of the relative entropy. Our proof shows that the entropic uncertainty principle…
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy production in macroscopic systems is non-negative, reaching zero only at thermodynamic equilibrium. As a corollary, this implies that the state trajectory of macroscopic systems is…
Causal Learning has emerged as a major theme of research in statistics and machine learning in recent years, promising specific computational techniques to apply to datasets that reveal the true nature of cause and effect in a number of…
Here we deconstruct, and then in a reasoned way reconstruct, the concept of "entropy of a system," paying particular attention to where the randomness may be coming from. We start with the core concept of entropy as a COUNT associated with…
Recent developments in the formalisation of quantum causal structures have made it possible to test and compare hypotheses about causal structure empirically, rather than being a-priori assumptions. Such differences in causal structure may…
We treat a quantum mechanical system with certain general properties which are expected to be common in macroscopic quantum systems. Starting from a PURE initial state (which may not describe an equilibrium) in which energy is mildly…
It has been a long time issue in statistical physics how to combine reversible microscopic equations with irreversible macroscopic behavior. Recently, Evans and Searles have suggested causality as the key concept for a solution to the…
Complex systems can be described at myriad different scales, and their causal workings often have multiscale structure (e.g., a computer can be described at the microscale of its hardware circuitry, the mesoscale of its machine code, and…
Causal models defined in terms of structural equations have proved to be quite a powerful way of representing knowledge regarding causality. However, a number of authors have given examples that seem to show that the Halpern-Pearl (HP)…
A heat engine undergoes a cyclic operation while in equilibrium with the net result of conversion of heat into work. Quantum effects such as superposition of states can improve an engine's efficiency by breaking detailed balance, but this…