séminaire HistPhilPhys

"The reduction of thermodynamics to mechanics"

The traditional reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics contains a number of puzzles: for example: most statistical mechanical systems are temporally symmetric, whereas thermodynamics is seemingly temporally asymmetric, exhibiting an arrow of time. And: whereas statistical mechanics allows fluctuations out of equilibrium, apparently thermodynamics does not. In this talk, I propose to solve the problem through a new reduction of thermodynamics to the mechanics of dynamical systems. This reduction does not require any statistical information, and thereby sidesteps the longstanding challenges. The result is a new interpretation of thermodynamics, according to which familiar systems like boxes of gas and exotic systems like black holes exhibit “heat” in exactly the same sense, and in a way that avoids the problems of reduction.