Berlin 2018 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 3: Philosophie der Physik III

AGPhil 3.3: Vortrag

Donnerstag, 15. März 2018, 13:45–14:15, H 2033

The dilemma of the observer and the second law of thermodynamics — •Matteo Polettini — Physics and Materials Science Research Unit, University of Luxembourg, Campus Limpertsberg, 162a avenue de la Faiencerie, L-1511 Luxembourg (Luxembourg)

The statistical description of irreversible phenomena and the information-theoretic interpretation of entropy introduce the dilemma of the observer in thermodynamics. If entropy is a measure of missing information, will the second law of thermodynamics depend on whether the observer has a Ph.D. in physics? While many would take a materialistic approach to this hurdle, arguing that the analogy between Shannon's informational entropy and Gibbs's statistical entropy is just incidental, we argue that a dependency on the observer can and should be included without making physical laws less "objective". Furthermore, this approach is actually more prudent and secular than the materialistic one, as we show that this latter surreptitiously introduces a preferential observer and "sweeps the dirt under the carpet". In technical terms, we show that the choice of prior probabilities in statistical physics is a gauge symmetry of the second law.