1202.3324 (Matteo Smerlak)

On the inertia of heat    [PDF]

Matteo Smerlak

Does heat have inertia? This question is at the core of a long-standing
controversy on Eckart's dissipative relativistic hydrodynamics. Here I show
that the troublesome inertial term in Eckart's heat flux arises only if one
insists on defining thermal diffusivity as a spacetime constant. I argue that
this is the most natural definition, and that all confusion disappears if one
considers instead the space-dependent comoving diffusivity, in line with the
fact that, in the presence of gravity, space is an inhomogeneous medium.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.3324