Entropy concepts in classical electrodynamics

Aspects of entropy and related thermodynamic analyses are discussed here that have been deduced in recent years in the area of classical electrodynamics. A motivating factor for most of this work has been an attempted theory of nature often called, “stochastic electrodynamics” (SED). This theory involves classical electrodynamics (Maxwell’s equations plus the relativistic version of Newton’s second law of motion for particles), but with the consideration that motion and fluctuations should not necessarily be assumed to reduce to zero at temperature T = 0. Both fairly subtle and rather blatant assumptions were often imposed in early thermodynamic analyses of electrodynamic systems that prevented the analyses from being sufficiently general to account for these “zero-point” properties, which hindered classical physics from being able to better account for quantum mechanical phenomena observed in nature. In turn, such thermodynamic considerations have helped motivate many of the key ideas of SED.