Heidelberg 2022 – wissenschaftliches Programm

Bereiche | Tage | Auswahl | Suche | Aktualisierungen | Downloads | Hilfe

AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 11: Time and Temperature

AGPhil 11.3: Vortrag

Donnerstag, 24. März 2022, 17:15–17:45, AGPhil-H14

On the Status of Temperature and Thermodynamics in Relativity — •Eugene Y. S. Chua — University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA

The project to understand black holes thermodynamically (i.e. black hole thermodynamics) was motivated by how stationary black holes can be characterized by laws analogous to the laws of classical thermodynamics. Taking this analogy seriously as evidence that black holes are thermodynamical seems to require that thermodynamics be relevant in the large-scale relativistic regime, viz. that there is a relativistic thermodynamics to speak of. However, an unresolved debate from the 1960s over the (lack of a) canonical Lorentz transformation for a central thermodynamic concept - temperature (and heat) - undermines this very assumption by asking whether thermodynamics could be relativized at all. By examining this debate, I argue that temperature, like absolute simultaneity, is not relativistic. We can readily judge simultaneity within a frame, just as co-moving observers can readily discern a system's temperature. However, the debate suggests there is no fact of the matter about the temperature of a moving object, just as there is no absolute sense that two objects moving relative to one another are simultaneous with each other. This pushes back against the idea that classical thermodynamics should be extended into the relativistic regime. The upshot for black hole thermodynamics: the thermodynamical analogy should not be taken too seriously.