In Praise of Clausius Entropy: Reassessing the Foundations of Boltzmannian Statistical Mechanics

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Abstract

I will argue, pace a great many of my contemporaries, that there's something right about Boltzmann's attempt to ground the second law of thermodynamics in a suitably amended deterministic time-reversal invariant classical dynamics, and that in order to appreciate what's right about (what was at least at one time) Boltzmann's explanatory project, one has to fully apprehend the nature of microphysical causal structure, time-reversal invariance, and the relationship between Boltzmann entropy and the work of Rudolf Clausius.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number59
JournalFoundations of Physics
Volume51
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2021

Keywords

  • Boltzmann
  • Causation
  • Entropy
  • Irreversibility
  • Statistical mechanics

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Philosophy
  • General Physics and Astronomy
  • History and Philosophy of Science

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