New answers tagged arrow-of-time
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This paper,
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n4/full/ncomms2665.html
Shows how a thermodynamic cycle of a gas can generate work for free if generalized uncertainty relations are violated. It ties uncertainty principle to notions of information theory.
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The third law of thermodynamics has a purely quantum-mechanical origin. However, the second law applies equally to classical and quantum-mechanical systems. For instance, it applies to an ideal gas. This tells us that the second law doesn't depend logically on quantum mechanics.
So that definition makes it sound like entropy is simply losing
...
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Does the scientific community consider the Loschmidt paradox resolved? If so what is the resolution?
Although summarized as an objection of macroscopic irreversibility when microscopic laws are reversible, Loschmidt's objection originally points that there has to be something breaking the time reversal symmetry in Boltzmann's derivation of the $H$-theorem.
I think that Boltzmann's answer was to say that high $H$ states (in absence of external driving) are ...
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Does the scientific community consider the Loschmidt paradox resolved? If so what is the resolution?
I think most people would say the paradox is resolved - but, as the answers to this question make clear, they wouldn't necessarily agree about who resolved it or what precisely the resolution is. For my money the paradox was elegantly resolved by Edwin Jaynes in this 1965 paper. In Jaynes' argument, the symmetry is broken by the fact that we, as ...
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I suppose the key point for a good answer is to use the fact that, say, electrons are not only identical but also indistinguishable one from the other. This means that certainly points 2. and 3. of your post cannot be applied.
It's intuitively plausible, instead, that one can track an electron, for example produced in a nuclear reaction, and follow it for ...
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The fact that electrons are identical particles doesn't mean you can't separate one from another and keep track of which is which. They can be told apart according to their positions, energies, and momenta. Say I stick a $\beta^-$ source a foot away from a Geiger counter and I get a click. I know that the electron I detected was 1 ns old (c=1 ft/ns). This ...
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