Related papers: Probability as a physical motive
Human-created engines and evolutionarily optimized molecular motors exhibit sophisticated design in order to harvest chemical or thermal energy for generating unidirectional motion. The complexity of these motors makes their random…
The universe is certainly not yet in total thermodynamical equilibrium,so clearly some law telling about special initial conditions is needed. A universe or a system imposed to behave periodically gets thereby required ``initial…
We revisit the concavity property of the thermodynamic entropy in order to formulate a general proof of the minimum energy principle as well as of other equivalent extremum principles that are valid for thermodynamic potentials and…
This paper addresses fundamental aspects of statistical mechanics such as the motivation of a classical state space with spontaneous transitions, the meaning of non-equilibrium in the context of thermalization, and the justification of…
We investigate the laws of thermodynamics in an accelerating universe driven by dark energy with a time-dependent equation of state. In the case we consider that the physically relevant part of the Universe is that envelopped by the…
A principle of information conservation is shown in abstract terms to rule out probabilistic physical laws, necessitating the existence of state trajectories. It furthermore provides a geometric-thermodynamic mechanism for the appearance of…
According to the Causal Principle, anything that begins to exist has a cause. In turn, various authors -- including Thomas Hobbes, Jonathan Edwards, and Arthur Prior -- have defended the thesis that, had the Causal Principle been false,…
This article describes the third law of thermodynamics. This law is often poorly known and is often decried, or even considered optional and irrelevant to describe weather and climate phenomena. This, however, is inaccurate and contrary to…
Computational complexity is examined using the principle of increasing entropy. To consider computation as a physical process from an initial instance to the final acceptance is motivated because many natural processes have been recognized…
We develop a new formalism for constructing probabilities associated to the causal ordering of events in quantum theory, where by an event we mean the emergence of a measurement record on a detector. We start with constructing probabilities…
Boltzmann's struggle with a derivation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is sketched. So is his first derivation of the connection between entropy and probability in 1877. Planck's derivation and quantum mechanical modifications of…
There is a paradox in the standard model of cosmology. How can matter in the early universe have been in thermal equilibrium, indicating maximum entropy, but the initial state also have been low entropy (the "past hypothesis"), so as to…
A general principle is advanced allowing the classification of nonunique solutions to nonlinear evolution equations, corresponding to different spatio-temporal patterns. This is done by defining the probability distribution of patterns,…
We solve a set of selected exercises on rotational motion requiring a mechanical and thermodynamical analysis. When non-conservative forces or thermal effects are present, a complete study must use the first law of thermodynamics together…
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy increases (or does not change) by time in an isolated system. As microscopic physical laws are reversible, the origin of irreversibility is not straightforward. Although the outcome of a…
The nature of a physical law is examined, and it is suggested that there may not be any fundamental dynamical laws. This explains the intrinsic indeterminism of quantum theory. The probabilities for transition from a given initial state to…
Maximum entropy principle (MEP) offers an effective and unbiased approach to inferring unknown probability distributions when faced with incomplete information, while neural networks provide the flexibility to learn complex distributions…
We provide a simple physical interpretation, in the context of the second law of thermodynamics, to the information inequality (a.k.a. the Gibbs' inequality, which is also equivalent to the log-sum inequality), asserting that the relative…
This work presents a general unifying theoretical framework for quantum non-equilibrium systems. It is based on a re-statement of the dynamical problem as one of inferring the distribution of collision events that move a system toward…
The maximum entropy principle (MEP) is a method for obtaining the most likely distribution functions of observables from statistical systems, by maximizing entropy under constraints. The MEP has found hundreds of applications in ergodic and…