相关论文: Probability as a physical motive

Consider a population of organisms that harvest free energy from their environment to reproduce. This paper shows that if the organisms' reproductive rates are proportional to the amount of physical free energy that they can convert into…

At this point in time, two major areas of physics, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, rest on the foundations of probability and entropy. The last century saw several significant fundamental advances in our understanding of the…

Growing economic inequalities are observed in several countries throughout the world. Following Pareto, the power-law structure of these inequalities has been the subject of much theoretical and empirical work. But their nonequilibrium…

According to thermodynamics, the inevitable increase of entropy allows the past to be distinguished from the future. From this perspective, any clock must incorporate an irreversible process that allows this flow of entropy to be tracked.…

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 -…

Thermodynamics is usually developed starting from entropy and the maximum entropy principle. We investigate here to what extent one can replace entropy with relative entropy which has several advantages, for example in the context of local…

The nature takes the easiest and most accessible paths and, hence, processes are accomplished very quickly in a minimum time. In 1662 P. Fermat used this principle to work out the refraction law. This was one of the first known attempts at…

We consider the entropy production of a strongly coupled bipartite system. The total entropy production can be partitioned into various components, which we use to define local versions of the Second Law that are valid without the usual…

We establish Extended Thermodynamics (ET) of rarefied polyatomic gases with six independent fields, i.e., the mass density, the velocity, the temperature and the dynamic pressure, without adopting the near-equilibrium approximation. The…

Statistical physics aims to describe properties of macroscale systems in terms of distributions of their microscale agents. Its central tool is the maximization of entropy, a variational principle. We review the history of this principle,…

The problem of the insensitivity of the macroscopic behavior of any thermodynamical system to partitioning generates a bias between the reproducibility of its macroscopic behavior viewed as the simplest form of causality and its long-term…

We study nonequilibrium thermodynamics of complex information flows induced by interactions between multiple fluctuating systems. Characterizing nonequilibrium dynamics by causal networks (i.e., Bayesian networks), we obtain novel…

This study examines a new formulation of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, which gives a conditional derivation of the ``maximum entropy production'' (MEP) principle for flow and/or chemical reaction systems at steady state. The analysis uses…

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…

These lectures deal with the problem of inductive inference, that is, the problem of reasoning under conditions of incomplete information. Is there a general method for handling uncertainty? Or, at least, are there rules that could in…

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…

Thermodynamic relations are derived from first principles of mechanics for non-equilibrium processes. Since the key role herein is played by the law of increase of entropy, the latter is analyzed at first. It is shown that its derivation…

Quantum mechanics allows the occurrence of events without having any definite causal order. Here, it is shown that the application of two different thermal channels in the causally inseparable order can enhance the potential to extract…

In classical phenomenological thermodynamics the first and second laws can be regarded as independent statements. Statistical mechanics provides a microscopic substratum that explains thermodynamics in probabilistic terms via a microstate…

Entropy serves as a central observable which indicates uncertainty in many chemical, thermodynamical, biological and ecological systems, and the principle of the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) is widely supported in natural science. Recently,…