On Friday, 7 May, Tim Maudlin (New York University) will give a talk entitled “S=kln(B(W)): Boltzmann entropy, the Second Law, and the Architecture of Hell” (abstract below).
The meeting will take place online on Zoom (17:00-19:00 CEST). If you have not registered yet, you can do so by sending a message to antonio.vassallo@pw.edu.pl.
The Colloquium is organized by the Philosophy of Physics Group at the International Center for Formal Ontology (Faculty of Administration and Social Sciences, Warsaw University of Technology).
The program for the summer semester can be found here, while the recordings of the previous meetings are available on ICFO’s YouTube channel.
ABSTRACT
The concept of entropy was introduced in the setting of classical
thermodynamics, which was agnostic about the microscopic structure of
matter. The advent of the atomic theory and the kinetic theory of heat
allowed for the same phenomena to be
approached from the standpoint of statistical mechanics, a plan
originated by Maxwell and Boltzmann. But in order to “translate” or
“reduce” classical thermodynamics into the language of statistical
mechanics and the kinetic theory, one needs definitions of
terms like “temperature” and “pressure” and “entropy” in the language of
the microphysics. One famous such definition—commonly ascribe to
Boltzmann but actually due to Planck—is S = k ln(W).
I will propose that in a certain explanatory sense this is the
wrong definition. And further, that the proper definition sheds light on
the reversibility paradoxes and on the role—or lack of one—of the Past
Hypothesis in the reduction of classical thermodynamics
to statistical mechanics.