Time and irreversibility in axiomatic thermodynamics

Irreversibility and the second law of thermodynamics

The second law of thermodynamics has a curious status. Manymodern physicists regard it as an obsolete relic from a bygone age, while many others, even today, consider it one of the most firmly established and secure achievements of science ever accomplished. From the perspective of the foundations of physics, a particularly interesting question is its relationship with the notion of irreversibi...

Constantin Carathéodory and the axiomatic thermodynamics

The birth, raise, development and fortunes of a fundamental theory in thermodynamics, the axiomatic thermodynamics, a creation of Constantin Carathéodory, is thoroughly presented together with a summary of Carathéodory’s biography. Axiomatic thermodynamics is centered around some interesting properties of Pfaffian differential equations, which are here introduced and used for some well-known ca...

An axiomatic foundation for continuum thermodynamics

Irreversibility time scale.

Entropy creation rate is introduced for a system interacting with thermostats (i.e., for a system subject to internal conservative forces interacting with "external" thermostats via conservative forces) and a fluctuation theorem for it is proved. As an application, a time scale is introduced, to be interpreted as the time over which irreversibility becomes manifest in a process leading from an ...

Time-reversal invariance and irreversibility in time-asymmetric quantum mechanics

The aim of this paper is to analyze the concepts of time-reversal invariance and irreversibility in the so-called ’time-asymmetric quantum mechanics’. We begin with pointing out the difference between these two concepts. On this basis, we show that irreversibility is not as tightly linked to the semigroup evolution laws of the theory -which lead to its non time-reversal invarianceas usually sug...