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Hawking radiation and reversibility
It's often said that, as long as the information that fell into a black hole comes out eventually in the Hawking radiation (by whatever means), pure states remain pure rather than evolving into mixed ...
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Intuitively, why is a reversible process one in which the system is always at equilibrium?
A process is reversible if and only if it's always at equilibrium during the process. Why?
I have heard several specific example of this, such as adding weight gradually to a piston to compress the ...
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Irreversible expansion and time reversal symmetry
Suppose there are N non-interacting classical particles in a box, so their state can be described by the $\{\mathbf{x}_i(t), \mathbf{p}_i(t) \}$. If the particles are initially at the left of the box, ...
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How slow is a reversible adiabatic expansion of an ideal gas?
A truly reversible thermodynamic process needs to be infinitesimally displaced from equilibrium at all times and therefore takes infinite time to complete. However, if I execute the process slowly, I ...