1301.2150 (V. J. Vieland)

An Evidential Interpretation of the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics    [PDF]

V. J. Vieland

I argue here that both the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics, generally understood to be quintessentially physical in nature, can be equally well described as being about the flow dynamics of information without the need to invoke physical manifestations for information. This involves developing two distinct, yet related, forms of bookkeeping: one pertaining to what physicists generally understand as information per se, which I call purely combinatoric information; and the other pertaining to a version of what physicists understand as energy, which I call evidential information, for reasons to be made clear. I illustrate both sets of books with application to a simple coin-tossing (binomial) experiment. I then show that the physical quantity temperature (T) linking those two forms of bookkeeping together in physics has a familiar, but surprising, interpretation in this setting: the direct informational analogue of T turns out to be what we would in ordinary English call the evidence.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.2150