Entropy from Carnot to Bekenstein
History and Philosophy of Physics
2018-10-19 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Physics - Theory
Quantum Physics
Abstract
The second half of this essay tells the story of the genesis and early development of the notion of black hole entropy, in the style of an after dinner talk (apart from a long technical footnote). The first half sketches the development of the concept of entropy, beginning with Carnot, passing via Thomson, Clausius, Boltzmann, Planck, von Neumann, and Shannon on the way to Bekenstein, and the essay ends with a retrospective on Lema\^itre. The central theme is the fault-tolerant way that profound insights have emerged from simple (yet subtle) thermodynamic reasoning.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1810.07839,
title = {Entropy from Carnot to Bekenstein},
author = {Ted Jacobson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.07839},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
To appear in "Jacob Bekenstein Memorial Volume", to be published by World Scientific Publishing