Entropy, once seen as a measure of disorder in physical systems, is now understood as a reflection of our ignorance and knowledge limitations. This evolving perspective links entropy to information theory and challenges traditional views of objectivity in science.
Sorkin and colleagues have derived an equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics for living systems, which establishes a relation between such a cell’s active uptake of energy and its random-looking path in terms of entropy production.
The article discusses how modern cosmology, specifically the FLRW metric, can be derived using symmetry considerations, Newtonian Mechanics, and Thermodynamics, without the need for General Relativity.
Physicists and computer scientists are using stochastic thermodynamics to understand the energy costs of computation, with implications for designing more energy-efficient devices.
This review article discusses the concept of entropy in statistical physics and its role as both a tool for inference and a measure of time irreversibility. It highlights the developments in stochastic thermodynamics and the principle of maximum caliber, emphasizing the importance of cross-talk among researchers in disparate fields.
In this personal essay, Stephen Wolfram recounts his fifty-year intellectual journey to understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a quest sparked by a mysterious physics textbook during his childhood. His path evolved from early attempts at simulating molecular dynamics on primitive computers to a professional focus on particle physics and cosmology, where he frequently grappled with the tension between increasing entropy and the spontaneous emergence of complex structure. This search eventually led him away from traditional statistical mechanics and toward the study of cellular automata through his work in symbolic computation. Ultimately, Wolfram describes how this shift allowed him to discover that highly complex, organized behaviors can emerge from simple computational rules rather than requiring microscopic irreversibility, fundamentally reshaping his understanding of how complexity arises in the universe.
The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of quantum information.
