Related papers: Why Do We Believe in the Second Law?
For macroscopic systems, the second law of thermodynamics establishes an inequality between the amount of work performed on a system in contact with a thermal reservoir, and the change in its free energy. For microscopic systems, this…
Reciprocal relations correlate fairly accurately a great variety of experimental results. Nevertheless, the concepts of statistical fluctuations, and microscopic reversibility - the bases of the accepted proof of the relations by Onsager -…
We pointed out that the generalized second law of thermodynamics on a de Sitter universe whose energy density stochastically fluctuates due to quantum fluctuations is seemingly violated. We have shown that even in such a case, the…
Murphy's Law is $not$ a law in the formal sense yet popular science often compares it with the Second Law of Thermodynamics as both the statements point toward a more disorganized state with time. In this paper, we first construct a…
The second law of thermodynamics, formulated as an ultimate bound on the maximum extractable work, has been rigorously derived in multiple scenarios. However, the unavoidable limitations that emerge due to the lack of control on small…
We argue against current proposals concerning the non-existence of time. We point out that a large number of these proposals rely, at least implicitly, on the assumption of `closure' (or `partial closure') of the laws of Physics. I.e. the…
The second law of thermodynamics is a statement about the statistics of the entropy production, $\langle \Sigma \rangle \geq 0$. For small systems, it is known that the entropy production is a random variable and negative values ($\Sigma <…
In textbooks on statistical mechanics, one finds often arguments based on classical mechanics, phase space and ergodicity in order to justify the second law of thermodynamics. However, the basic equations of motion of classical mechanics…
We reconsider the basic building blocks of classical phenomenological thermodynamics. While doing so we show that the zeroth law is a redundant postulate for the theory by deriving it from the first and the second laws. This is in stark…
Fluctuations of thermodynamic observables, such as heat and work, contain relevant information on the underlying physical process. These fluctuations are however not taken into account in the traditional laws of thermodynamics. While the…
Second law of thermodynamics can be apparently violated for systems whose dynamics depends on acquired information by measurement. However, when one consider measurement and erasure process together along with the system it saves the second…
This work is focused on the exploration of the thermodynamics foundations of the matter creation scenario when a generalized form of the second law of thermodynamics for this scheme is implemented. In this scenario we consider an expanding…
The second law of thermodynamics places a limitation into which states a system can evolve into. For systems in contact with a heat bath, it can be combined with the law of energy conservation, and it says that a system can only evolve into…
This thesis investigates the connection between quantum theory, thermodynamics and information theory. Theories with structure similar to that of quantum theory are considered, mathematically described by the framework of "Generalized…
We proved when random-variable fluctuations obey the central limit theorem the equality of the uncertainty relation corresponds to the thermodynamic equilibrium state. The inequality corresponds to the thermodynamic non-equilibrium state.…
The authors of Ref. [1] claim to have experimental verification of violations of the second law of thermodynamics based on the assertions: (i) "for large systems and over long times the entropy production rate is necessarily positive"; (ii)…
We consider a generalisation of thermodynamics that deals with multiple conserved quantities at the level of individual quantum systems. Each conserved quantity, which, importantly, need not commute with the rest, can be extracted and…
The present work shows that the second law of thermodynamics gets naturally satisfied during the entire cosmic evolution of the universe starting from inflation to the late dark energy era, without imposing any exotic condition. This makes…
In a macroscopic (quantum or classical) Hamiltonian system, we prove the second law of thermodynamics in the forms of the minimum work principle and the law of entropy increase, under the assumption that the initial state is described by a…
The essence of the second law of classical thermodynamics is the `entropy principle' which asserts the existence of an additive and extensive entropy function, S, that is defined for all equilibrium states of thermodynamic systems and whose…