Related papers: Microscopic Reversibility and Macroscopic Behavior…
Time-asymmetric behavior as embodied in the second law of thermodynamics is observed in {\it individual macroscopic} systems. It can be understood as arising naturally from time-symmetric microscopic laws when account is taken of a) the…
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…
Microphysical laws are time reversible, but macrophysics, chemistry and biology are not. This chapter explores how this asymmetry (a classic example of a broken symmetry) arises due to the cosmological context, where a non-local Direction…
I give a highly selective overview of the way statistical mechanics explains the microscopic origins of the time asymmetric evolution of macroscopic systems towards equilibrium and of first order phase transitions in equilibrium. These…
The irreversibility in a statistical system is traced to its probabilistic evolution, and the molecular chaos assumption is not its unique consequence as is commonly believed. Under the assumption that the rate of change of the each…
We show that the equations which describe irreversible evolution of a system can be derived from a variational principle. We suggest a Lagrangian, which depends on the properties of the normal and the so-called "mirror-image" system. The…
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…
The dynamics of irreversible relaxation of non-equilibrium macroscopic systems is discussed. Arguments are developed showing that the general process is supported by two independent successive mechanisms. One is mixing and it follows pure…
Statistical mechanics descriptions of the second law of thermodynamics generally imply point-like particles driven by a dissipative overall mechanism for their simultaneous time-evolution. As the number of involved particles grows larger,…
It is often claimed that the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic and time-symmetric and that therefore our experience of the passage of time is an illusion. This paper will critically discuss these claims and show that they are…
The dynamics of molecular collisions in a macroscopic body are encoded by the parameter Thermodynamic entropy - a statistical measure of the number of molecular configurations that correspond to a given macrostate. Directionality in the…
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.…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
The microscopic derivation of the second law for macroscopic system is given under the phenomenological assumption that both the initial and final states are described by mutually different canonical ensembles. In particular, it is also…
Molecular Dynamics and Statistical Mechanics make possible a particle-based understanding of Thermodynamics and Hydrodynamics, including the fascinating Loschmidt contradiction between time-reversible atomistic mechanics and the…
Emergence of one-time-direction macroscopic evolution of a classical system of two mixed gases having different temperatures is derived and explained. The analysis performed at the microscopic level, where the time-symmetric laws of…
All of the basic microsopic physical laws are time reversible. In contrast, the second law of thermodynamics, which is a macroscopic physical representation of the world, is able to describe irreversible processes in an isolated system…
Fundamental laws of physics are symmetric under time reversal ($T$) symmetry, but the $T$ symmetry is strongly broken in the macroscopic world. In this Perspective, I review $T$ symmetry breaking frameworks: \textit{second law of…
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 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…