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