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

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

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.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 107,895

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Analytics

Added to PP
2021-01-26

Downloads
127 (#187,346)

6 months
11 (#482,904)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Christopher Gregory Weaver
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Citations of this work

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

Add more citations

References found in this work

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

View all 52 references / Add more references