Hans Halvorson Physics, Logic, Philosophy

Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics

  • Bohr was known to hold a special interest for Gibbs’ approach to thermodynamics.1

  • Open question: is Bohr ideologically committed to Gibbs’ defintion of entropy in a way that would put him in opposition to the view of (Goldstein et al. 2020)? (That book contains state-of-the-art discussion of the relation between statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.)

  • Bohr claimed that thermodynamics presages the full-blown complementarity between quantities in quantum mechanics; in particular, energy and temperature are “almost complementary” quantities. See the first-hand account in (Bohr 1932) and the second-hand account in (Heisenberg 2013). The Heisenberg book is available in English as Physics and Beyond, but the translation is not very good. See also (Lindhard and Kalckar 1982; Lindhard 1986)

  • Uffink and van Lith (1999) dispute that claim that energy and temperature are complementary.

Bohr, Niels. 1932. “Faraday Lecture. Chemistry and the Quantum Theory of Atomic Constitution.” Journal of the Chemical Society, 349–84.
Goldstein, Sheldon, Joel L Lebowitz, Roderich Tumulka, and Nino Zanghı̀. 2020. “Gibbs and Boltzmann Entropy in Classical and Quantum Mechanics.” In Statistical Mechanics and Scientific Explanation: Determinism, Indeterminism and Laws of Nature, 519–81. World Scientific. https://doi.org/10.1142/9789811211720_0014.
Heisenberg, Werner. 2013. Der Teil Und Das Ganze: Gespräche Im Umkreis Der Atomphysik. Piper Verlag.
Lindhard, Jens. 1986. “Complementarity Between Energy and Temperature.” In The Lesson of Quantum Theory, edited by J. de Boer, E. Dal, and O. Ulfbeck, 99–112. North Holland, New York.
Lindhard, Jens, and Jørgen Kalckar. 1982. “Ubestemthed i Energi Og Temperatur.” Fysisk Tidsskrift 80 (2/3): 60–72.
Uffink, Jos, and Janneke Van Lith. 1999. “Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relations.” Foundations of Physics 29 (5): 655–92. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1018811305766.

  1. Personal communication with Tomas Bohr.↩︎