Related papers: Why Do We Believe in the Second Law?
This paper is a non-technical, informal presentation of our theory of the second law of thermodynamics as a law that is independent of statistical mechanics and that is derivable solely from certain simple assumptions about adiabatic…
An extensive survey is given of the historical origins of the Second Law of thermodynamics, illustrated by excerpts from many original sources, and with biographical information about key contributors. The major strands of conceptual…
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…
Thermodynamics, and in particular its first law, is of fundamental importance to Science, and therefore of great general interest to all physicists. The first law, although undoubtedly true, and believed by everyone to be true because of…
Even though the second law of thermodynamics holds the supreme position among the laws of nature, as stated by many distinguished scientists, notably Eddington and Einstein, its position appears to be also quite peculiar. Given the atomic…
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…
Evidence implies that basic laws of thermodynamics must be tested by experiments. In this paper, an experiment is designed to measure the entropy of a system with at least one known (measurable) equation of state, especially the gas…
In a previous paper [1] we considered the question, "What underlying property of nature is responsible for the second law?" A simple answer can be stated in terms of information: The fundamental loss of information gives rise to the second…
Even after over 150 years of discussion, the interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics continues to be a source of confusion and controversy in physics. This confusion has been accentuated by recent challenges to the second law and…
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…
Several models of quantum open systems are known at present to violate, according to principles of the standard quantum theory of open systems, the second law of thermodynamics. Here, a new and rather trivial model of another type is…
Uncertainty relations state that there exist certain incompatible measurements, to which the outcomes cannot be simultaneously predicted. While the exact incompatibility of quantum measurements dictated by such uncertainty relations can be…
I argue that if a special science satisfies certain key assumptions that are familiar from physicalist accounts of the special sciences and from physics, then its causal regularities have an associated notion of entropy, and that this…
The essential postulates of classical thermodynamics are formulated, from which the second law is deduced as the principle of increase of entropy in irreversible adiabatic processes that take one equilibrium state to another. The entropy…
In the scientific and engineering literature, the second law of thermodynamics is expressed in terms of the behavior of entropy in reversible and irreversible processes. According to the prevailing statistical mechanics interpretation the…
Based on recent data about the history of the Hubble factor, it is argued that the second law of thermodynamics holds at the largest scales accessible to observation. This is consistent with previous studies of the same question.
Second law of thermodynamics is applied to a few electronic processes. It is seen that the second law of thermodynamics holds good for all except one mentioned here. The classical approach, based on exact equivalence of emission and…
The first part of this paper is a condensed synthesis of the matter presented in several previous ones. It begins with an argumentation showing that the first and second laws of thermodynamics are incompatible with one another if they are…
Skeptics of biological evolution often claim that evolution requires a decrease in entropy, giving rise to a conflict with the second law of thermodynamics. This argument is fallacious because it neglects the large increase in entropy…
In an abstract setting of a general classical mechanical system as a model for the universe we set up a general formalism for a law behind the second law of thermodynamics, i.e. really for "initial conditions". We propose a unification with…