Related papers: The Source of Irreversibility in Macroscopic Dynam…
Thermodynamic relations are derived from first principles of mechanics for non-equilibrium processes. Since the key role herein is played by the law of increase of entropy, the latter is analyzed at first. It is shown that its derivation…
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…
The observed general time-asymmetric behavior of macroscopic systems -- embodied in the second law of thermodynamics -- arises naturally from time-symmetric microscopic laws due to the great disparity between macro and micro-scales. More…
The concept of entropy in nonequilibrium macroscopic systems is investigated in the light of an extended equation of motion for the density matrix obtained in a previous study. It is found that a time-dependent information entropy can be…
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…
The reversibility and recurrence paradoxes are key issues that have been left unsolved in researches on the foundation of thermodynamics since the 19th century. This article shows that (1) the reversibility paradox can be overcome if we pay…
The population dynamics and stability of ecosystems of interacting species is studied from the perspective of non-equilibrium thermodynamics by assuming that species, through their biotic and abiotic interactions, are units of entropy…
Irreversibility of spontaneous macroscopic dynamics and its asymmetry with respect to the sign reversal of the variable $t$ is usually interpreted as a genuine property of complex isolated systems. Discussion of the kinetics involved in…
A principle on the macroscopic motion of systems in thermodynamic equilibrium, rarely discussed in texts, is reviewed: Very small but still macroscopic parts of a fully isolated system in thermal equilibrium move as if points of a rigid…
The validity of the Second Law of thermodynamics, indisputable in the macroscopic world, is challenged at the mesoscopic level: a mesoscopic isolated system, possessing spatial dimensions of the order of a few microns, is capable, as shown…
This article aims at revisiting, with the aid of simple and neat numerical examples, some of the basic features of macroscopic irreversibility, and, thus, of the mechanical foundation of the second principle of thermodynamics as drawn by…
The irreversible entropy increase described by the second law of thermodynamics is fundamentally tied to thermalization and the emergence of equilibrium. In the first part of our work (Ref: arXiv.2503.04152), we constructed an isolated gas…
The approach to the analysis of the dynamic of non-equilibrium open systems within the framework of the laws of classical mechanics on the example a hard-disks is offered. This approach was based on Hamilton and Liouville generalized…
We obtain macroscopic isothermal thermodynamic transformations by space-time scalings of a microscopic Hamiltonian dynamics in contact with a heat bath. The microscopic dynamics is given by a chain of anharmonic oscillators subject to a…
The thermodynamic approach to non-equilibrium dynamics describes the state of macroscopic systems by means of a collection of intensities or intensive variables. The latter are by definition the differentials of the entropy with respect to…
The entropy production is commonly interpreted as measuring the distance from equilibrium. However, this explanation lacks a rigorous description due to the absence of a natural equilibrium measure. The present analysis formalizes this…
We obtain macroscopic adiabatic thermodynamic transformations by space-time scalings of a microscopic Hamiltonian dynamics subject to random collisions with the environment. The microscopic dynamics is given by a chain of oscillators…
It was predicted and recently experimentally confirmed that systems with microscopically reversible dynamics in locally quadratic potentials warm up faster than they cool down. This thermal relaxation asymmetry challenged the…
Small thermodynamic systems exhibit peculiar behavior different from that observed in long-scale systems. Non-equilibrium processes taking place in those systems are strongly influenced by the presence of fluctuations which can be large.…
Recently a number of approaches has been developed to connect the microscopic dynamics of particle systems to the macroscopic properties of systems in nonequilibrium stationary states, via the theory of dynamical systems. This way a direct…