In this first part of a two-part paper, we describe efforts in the early decades of this century to restrict the extent of violations of the Second Law of thermodynamics that were brought to light by the rise of the kinetic theory and the identification of fluctuation phenomena. We show how these efforts mutated into Szilard’s proposal that Maxwell’s Demon is exorcised by proper attention to the entropy costs associated with the Demon’s memory and information acquisition. In the second part (...) we will argue that the information theoretic exorcisms of the Demon provide largely illusory benefits. According to the case, they either return a presupposition that can be had without information theoretic consideration or they postulate a broader connection between information and entropy than can be sustained. (shrink)

Can we explain the laws of thermodynamics, in particular the irreversible increase of entropy, from the underlying quantum mechanical dynamics? Attempts based on classical dynamics have all failed. Albert (1994a,b; 2000) proposed a way to recover thermodynamics on a purely dynamical basis, using the quantum theory of the collapse of the wavefunction of Ghirardi, Rimini and Weber (1986). In this paper we propose an alternative way to explain thermodynamics within no-collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics. Our approach relies on the standard (...) quantum mechanical models of environmental decoherence of open systems, e.g. Joos and Zeh (1985) and Zurek and Paz (1994). (shrink)

This paper argues that the idea of a Maxwellian Demon presupposes a notion of non-physical free will. The author has changed her mind in this point later on and now thinks that Mawellian Demons are compatible with mechanics; see her paper on this from 2010 and book from 2012.

A classical gas at equilibrium satisfies the locality conditionif the correlations between local fluctuations at a pair of remote small regions diminish in the thermodynamic limit. The gas satisfies a strong locality conditionif the local fluctuations at any number of remote locations have no (pair, triple, quadruple....) correlations among them in the thermodynamic limit. We prove that locality is equivalent to a certain factorizability condition on the distribution function. The analogous quantum condition fails in the case of a freeBose gas. (...) Next we prove that strong locality is equivalent to the total factorizability of the distribution function, and thus (given Liourille’s theorem) to the Maxwell Boltzmann distribution for an ideal gas. (shrink)

We propose an "explanation scheme" for why the Gibbs phase average technique in classical equilibrium statistical mechanics works. Our account emphasizes the importance of the Khinchin-Lanford dispersion theorems. We suggest that ergodicity does play a role, but not the one usually assigned to it.