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

Foundations of Physics 51 (3):1-64 (2021)
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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.

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Christopher Gregory Weaver
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Citations of this work

Philosophy of statistical mechanics.Lawrence Sklar - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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References found in this work

Time and chance.David Z. Albert - 2000 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
The New Mechanical Philosophy.Stuart Glennan - 2017 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
After Physics.David Z. Albert - 2015 - Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Time and Chance.David Z. Albert - 2000 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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