Related papers: Why Do We Believe in the Second Law?
Life is a planetary feature that depends on its environment, but it has also strongly shaped the physical conditions on Earth, having created conditions highly suitable for a productive biosphere. Clearly, the second law of thermodynamics…
In a thermodynamic process with measurement and feedback, the second law of thermodynamics is no longer valid. In its place, various second-law-like inequalities have been advanced that each incorporate a distinct additional term accounting…
Though the truths of logic and pure mathematics are objective and independent of any contingent facts or laws of nature, our knowledge of these truths depends entirely on our knowledge of the laws of physics. Recent progress in the quantum…
In this letter, we investigate the validity of the generalized second law of thermodynamics of the universe bounded by the event horizon in the holographic dark energy model. The universe is chosen to be homogeneous and isotropic and the…
Carath\'eodory's formalism for classical thermodynamics is a rich alternative approach to this theory, although unpopular with students and physics professors. This approach dispenses with the content of thermal machines for the…
We review the remarkable relationship between the laws of black hole mechanics and the ordinary laws of thermodynamics. It is emphasized that - in analogy with the laws of thermodynamics - the validity the laws of black hole mechanics does…
Traditional discussions of the Second Law of Thermodynamics studied the limits of very specific types of devices, such as heat engines, chemical reactions, and molecules channeled by valves. Allahverdyan and Nieuwenhuizen (cond-mat/0110422)…
We investigate the generalized second law of thermodynamics (GSL) in generalized theories of gravity. We examine the total entropy evolution with time including the horizon entropy, the non-equilibrium entropy production, and the entropy of…
Why in our Universe the laws of thermodynamics are valid? In the paper is demonstrated the reason of it: if the time and the space are multifractal and the Universe is in an equilibrium state the laws of the thermodynamics are consequences…
The status of the sociophysics is discussed as placed between the physics and the sociology. In particular we ask if the second law of thermodynamics can be useful in social sciences.
An ultimate universal theory -- a complete theory that accounts, via few and simple first principles, for all the phenomena already observed and that will ever be observed -- has been, and still is, the aspiration of most physicists and…
The stability conditions of a relativistic hydrodynamic theory can be derived directly from the requirement that the entropy should be maximised in equilibrium. Here we use a simple geometrical argument to prove that, if the hydrodynamic…
We present a general framework for systems which are prepared in a non-stationary non-equilibrium state in the absence of any perturbation, and which are then further driven through the application of a time-dependent perturbation. We…
The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system can only increase over time. This appears to conflict with the reversible evolution of isolated quantum systems under the Schr\"odinger equation, which preserves…
The microscopic explanation of entropy has been challenged from both experimental and theoretical point of view. The expression of entropy is derived from the first law of thermodynamics indicating that entropy or the second law of…
Practicing mathematicians often assume that mathematical claims, when they are true, have good reasons to be true. Such a state of affairs is "unreasonable", in Wigner's sense, because basic results in computational complexity suggest that…
Black holes are extremely relativistic objects. Physical processes around them occur in a regime where the gravitational field is extremely intense. Under such conditions, our representations of space, time, gravity, and thermodynamics are…
The second law of thermodynamics implies a relationship between the net entropy export by the Earth and its internal irreversible entropy production. The application of this constraint for the purpose of understanding Earth's climate is…
The generalized second law is proven for semiclassical quantum fields falling across a causal horizon, minimally coupled to general relativity. The proof is much more general than previous proofs in that it permits the quantum fields to be…
We present an analysis of the foundations of the well known Clausius inequality. It is shown that, strictly speaking, the inequality is not a logical consequence of the Kelvin-Planck formulation of the second law of thermodynamics. Some…