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Departmental Colloquium

Title
Loschmidt, Boltzmann and the Second Law  
Guest Speaker
Prof. Richard J. Creswick  
Guest Affiliation
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of South Carolina  
Host
Howard Lee  
When
Thursday, January 26, 2012 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm  
Location
Physics 202  
Details

Since the last quarter of the 19th century, the status of the second law of thermodynamics has been fiercely debated. Boltzmann saw the 2nd law as a consequence of the complexity of molecular motions. Loschmidt argued that irreversibility cannot be derived from a fundamentally time-reversible dynamic principle.   In this talk I will describe a special class of dynamical systems for which the "Loschmidt Echo" can be observed and what such observations tell us about irreversibility and the arrow of time

 

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