The purpose of the paper is fivefold: (a) Argue that the question in the title can be presented in a meaningful manner and that it requires an answer. (b) Discuss the conventional answers and explain why they are unsatisfactory. (c) Suggest that a key ingredient in the answer could be the instability arising due to the ‘wrong’ sign in the Hilbert action for the kinetic energy term corresponding...

The submodel PSC of the ECHAM5/MESSy Atmospheric Chemistry model (EMAC) has been developed to simulate the main types of polar stratospheric clouds (PSC). The parameterisation of the supercooled ternary solutions (STS, type 1b PSC) in the submodel is based on Carslaw et al. (1995b), the thermodynamic approach to simulate ice particles (type 2 PSC) on Marti and Mauersberger (1993). For the forma...

The geometric study of thermodynamics began with Gibbs’s reformulation of the theory in terms of equilibrium states rather than processes [1]. The surface of the set of equilibrium states was Gibbs’s primary object of study and foreshadowed much of the modern differential geometric theory manifolds. Gibbs surfaces is where the geometric theory stood when I became a graduate student. The story t...

The Witt construction describes a functor from the category of Rings to the category of characteristic 0 rings. It is uniquely determined by a few associativity constraints which do not depend on the types of the variables considered, in other words, by integer polynomials. This universality allowed Alain Connes and Caterina Consani to devise an analogue of the Witt ring for characteristic one,...

Abstract. The dynamical spin structure factor S(Q, ω) in the small momentum region is derived analytically for the one-dimensional supersymmetric t-J model with 1/r interaction. Strong spin-charge separation is found in the spin dynamics. The structure factor S(Q,ω) with a given spin polarization does not depend on the electron density in the small momentum region. In the thermodynamic limit, o...

We have produced an interacting quantum degenerate Fermi gas of atoms composed of two spin states of magnetically trapped 40K. The relative Fermi energies are adjusted by controlling the population in each spin state. Thermodynamic measurements reveal a resulting imbalance in the mean energy per particle between the two species, which is a factor of 1.4 at our lowest temperature. This imbalance...

We have proposed an improved method for calculating surface tension of liquid-vapour interface based on the thermodynamic route. This method combines the central difference scheme used in the test-area method and the Bennett weighting factor. This improved method shows faster convergence than the test area method as the weighting factor reduces the asymmetric bias of two perturbations. In addit...

The thermodynamic formalism for rotating black holes, characterized by noncommutative and quantum corrections, is constructed. From a fundamental thermodynamic relation, the equations of state and thermodynamic response functions are explicitly given, and the effect of noncommutativity and quantum correction is discussed. It is shown that the well-known divergence exhibited in specific heat is ...

a thermodynamic analysis of the counter flow wet cooling tower (cwct) in the steelmaking unit of the khuzestan steel company (ksc) is performed in this paper. we evaluated both energy and exergy formulations for analyzing the heat and mass transfer, exergy and second-law efficiency in this cooling tower. the lewis factor le f is an indication of the relative rates of heat and mass transfer in a...

The holographic principle states that the information about a volume of a system is encoded on the boundary surface of the volume. Holography appears in many branches of physics, such as optics, electromagnetism, many-body physics, quantum gravity, and string theory. Here we show that holography is also an underlying principle in thermodynamics, a most important foundation of physics. The therm...