Related papers: The Causal Second Law
The explanation of the apparent universality of thermodynamics points toward the extension of the usual conceptual background of the second law. Arguments are collected that a basic guiding idea of stability of thermodynamic equilibrium…
In statistical thermodynamics the 2nd law is properly spelled out in terms of conditioned probabilities. As such it makes the statement, that `entropy increases with time' without preferring a time direction. In this paper I try to explain…
We seek here to unify the second law of thermodynamics with the other laws, or at least to put up a law behind the second law of thermodynamics. Assuming no fine tuning, concretely by a random Hamiltonian, we argue just from equations of…
A scheme for treating the Second Law of thermodynamics as a constraint and accounting for the approximate nature of constitutive assumptions in continuum thermomechanics is discussed. An unconstrained, concave, variational principle is…
We show that the conservation and the non-additivity of the information, together with the additivity of the entropy make the entropy increase in an isolated system. The collapse of the entangled quantum state offers an example of the…
A classical and quantum mechanical generalized second law of thermodynamics in cosmology implies constraints on the effective equation of state of the universe in the form of energy conditions, obeyed by many known cosmological solutions,…
Microscopic physical laws are time-symmetric, hence, a priori there exists no preferential temporal direction. However, the second law of thermodynamics allows one to associate the "forward" temporal direction to a positive variation of the…
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy increases (or does not change) by time in an isolated system. As microscopic physical laws are reversible, the origin of irreversibility is not straightforward. Although the outcome of a…
A major part of the many thermally driven processes in our natural environment as well as in engineering solutions of Carnot-type machinery is based on the second law of thermodynamics (or principle of entropy increase). An interesting link…
Using symmetric boundary conditions at separated times, I show analytically that both the time ordering of (macroscopic) causality and the direction of entropy increase follow from these boundary conditions. In particular, when the…
The universal validity of the second law of thermodynamics is widely attributed to a finely tuned initial condition of the universe. This creates a problem: why is the universe atypical? We suggest that the problem is an artefact created by…
The second law of thermodynamics is asymmetric with respect to time as it says that the entropy of the universe must have been lower in the past and will be higher in the future. How this time-asymmetric law arises from the time-symmetric…
Many fruitful analogies have emerged between the theories of quantum entanglement and thermodynamics, motivating the pursuit of an axiomatic description of entanglement akin to the laws of thermodynamics. A long-standing open problem has…
I use cosmology examples to illustrate that the second law of thermodynamics is not old and tired, but alive and kicking, continuing to stimulate interesting research on really big puzzles. The question "Why is the entropy so low?" (despite…
Recent theoretical progress in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, linking the physical principle of Maximum Entropy Production ("MEP") to the information-theoretical "MaxEnt" principle of scientific inference, together with conjectures from…
The 2nd law of thermodynamics yields an irreversible increase in entropy until thermal equilibrium is achieved. This irreversible increase is often assumed to require large and complex systems to emerge from the reversible microscopic laws…
When thermodynamics is understood as the science (or art) of constructing effective models of natural phenomena by choosing a minimal level of description capable of capturing the essential features of the physical reality of interest, the…
We postulate a principle stating that the initial condition of a physical system is typically algorithmically independent of the dynamical law. We argue that this links thermodynamics and causal inference. On the one hand, it entails…
An interesting question to explore in physics classes is whether gravity violates the second law of thermodynamics. Standard physics textbooks provide little to no discussion of the relationship between entropy and gravity, and the same is…
The second law of thermodynamics is discussed and reformulated from a quantum information theoretic perspective for open quantum systems using relative entropy. Specifically, the relative entropy of a quantum state with respect to…