ADR-020: thermodynamics joins the topics

Context

The owner asked how the record covers dissipative structures, then for the literature to be filed. Three agents filed it in parallel: Prigogine’s programme and the canonical systems, the critics and the fluctuation theorems, and life as dissipation. Each one, separately, reported the same gap and proposed the same word. Every work in the second batch had to take natural-sciences as its first tag, which is true of a physics paper and says nothing about which physics.

The record already held a thermodynamic strand with nowhere to put the fact: Still et al.’s “Thermodynamics of Prediction”, the stochastic thermodynamics of learning, Landauer 1961 and its commentary, quantum thermodynamics, the philosophy of statistical mechanics, and THEORY-026 and THEORY-030. Those carried information-theory and natural-sciences.

Decision

Add thermodynamics to topics, beside natural-sciences, in no group. Its blurb: “the second law and its extensions read for themselves — entropy and entropy production, irreversibility, nonequilibrium steady states and their stability, dissipative structures, fluctuation theorems and stochastic thermodynamics, and the thermodynamics of computation and of life”.

Tagged. No tag was removed.

• First, where natural-sciences was standing in for it: Glansdorff & Prigogine, Landauer 1975, Martyushev & Seleznev, Dewar 2003, Grinstein & Linsker, Kleidon 2009, Jarzynski, Crooks, Seifert, Schneider & Kay, Morowitz & Smith, England 2013 and Perunov, Marsland & England.
• Second, after the subject: Prigogine’s Nobel lecture and Nicolis & Prigogine (after complex-systems), Schrödinger’s What Is Life?, quantum thermodynamics (LIT-010), THEORY-026 and THEORY-030.
• After information-theory or learning-theory: LIT-327, LIT-308, LIT-328, LIT-360 and LIT-041.
• Last: LIT-082 (observational entropy), LIT-114 (philosophy of statistical mechanics) and Cross & Hohenberg, whose §XIII.B is the record’s statement against general extremum principles.

Left without it, on purpose: Friston’s “Life as we know it”, whose free energy is variational and computes no heat or work; Turing 1952 and the BZ reaction, which are read for their patterns; and Deacon and Moreno & Mossio, which are about organization, not thermodynamics.

Alternatives considered

• Keep natural-sciences. It is the record’s word for physics, chemistry and biology read outside any machine-learning claim. It cannot tell Jarzynski from a planetary-science paper, and the record now holds enough thermodynamics that a reader looking for it needs a page.
• A narrower word, nonequilibrium-thermodynamics. It would leave out Landauer’s principle, quantum thermodynamics and the philosophy of statistical mechanics, which are the strand the record already held.
• philosophy-of-biology as well. One agent proposed it for Deacon, Moreno & Mossio and the teleology debate. Two unread books and one paper are not yet enough; it waits for a filing that brings more.